Cold Specks materialized suddenly, almost 15 years ago, like an apparition.
Ladan Hussein’s little-known music project had sparked buzz in the U.K., landing the Toronto singer a spot on “Later … with Jools Holland,” a popular BBC late-night show.
Wearing a simple red jumper and illuminated by a single spotlight, Hussein performed two stripped back songs, including a striking a cappella rendition of the traditional folk song “Old Stepstones,” her eyes squeezed closed, that out-of-time voice — silken, but sharp-edged — cleaving the silence.
Arriving at the height of indie rock’s late golden era, Cold Specks felt like a miraculous anachronism: a gothic union of southern R&B, blues and rock — what Hussein calls “doom soul.” Her early songs were sparse and wintry, but filled with raw emotion that could overwhelm.
“When the night comes, who will you be? / Even the dead can be astoundingly alive,” she sings on “Blank Maps,” an early Cold Specks single that showcased Hussein’s distinct blend of world-weary resolve, her pursuit of light in the gloom.
Chantal Kreviazuk, a singer, Juno-winning songwriter and Cold Specks collaborator, told me that she was “brought to tears” when she heard Hussein’s music for the first time. “So much of the human condition involves trying to control that which we can’t control,” says Kreviazuk, who has also written songs for Christina Aguilera, Pink and Carrie Underwood. “Ladan does a great job of expressing that struggle, the pain of not being able to be content in the moment and reflecting on the past.”
In the decade that followed, Hussein built a reputation for being your favourite artist’s favourite artist: she collaborated with Massive Attack, Swans and Moby and performed at Joni Mitchell’s birthday party at Massey Hall.
She released two more acclaimed albums, before extensive touring and mental health struggles started to derail her career. She began to spiral, eventually suffering a breakdown.
In 2018, Hussein was hospitalized at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and treated for what her doctors thought was schizophrenia. Three years later, she suffered another severe episode and was diagnosed as bipolar. Though she was public about her struggle with mental illness, she largely receded from the spotlight.
In January, I received an email from Hussein out of the blue. She wanted to discuss a new album, which she said she’d been working on for almost a decade.
I opened the audio file and hit play. As soon as I heard Hussein’s voice, all the emotions I associated with Cold Specks came flooding back.
“Fever dreams and shattered hearts / Voices stop me every start,” Hussein sings on “How It Feels,” a big-tent piano ballad that opens the record. She sounds older, her voice elegantly thickened by the passage of difficult years. “I just want to remem — ber how it feels,” she thunders through shimmering strings, each syllable stretched outward like a stepladder ascending from darkness.
Arriving Wednesday, “Light for the Midnight” — a title inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks poem that Hussein says profoundly captured her experience with psychosis — is an extraordinary comeback album that sublimates pain into a work of breathtaking beauty.
Written and meticulously assembled alongside an impressive list of songwriters and session musicians — including composer Owen Pallett and Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley — the album moves between stripped-back piano ballads and potent rock songs. It’s an album about loss and separation, and an attempt to put the pieces back together following an intense breakup and series of mental health crises.
“It is a solemn record,” Hussein admitted, thoughtfully. “But the despair is not overwhelming. It is hopeful. It is full of light.”
On a blindingly bright afternoon in February, I met up with Hussein at Hart House, a neo-Gothic student centre at the University of Toronto. Outside, sunlight dazzled across the newly accumulated mounds of snow, a vivid contrast to the tranquility in the towering stone building. Hussein led me through a mazelike hallway and into the Great Hall, a stately room adorned with stained glass windows and bronze chandeliers. She placed two heavy chairs about 12 feet apart.
She was very anxious, she told me — this was the first interview she had done in years.
She pointed to a Steinway grand piano tucked in the corner of the room. Here, nearly 20 years ago as a U of T student, she first discovered her voice.
“I’d skip class and sign up to use the piano, and I’d just get to be by myself,” she said. She didn’t know how to play, but knew she had an aptitude for music: “I’d pick out notes, and try to find my pitch and tune.” She was pensive. “This was my favourite room.”
During our hour-long conversation, Hussein bounced between subjects. Her nerves slowly receded, but she was easily distracted, and pulled away on various tangents.
Between sneaky drags from her vape, she shared anecdotes from the whirlwind early days of her career: mingling with Adele, collaborating with Massive Attack, working with Radiohead engineer Sam Petts-Davies. She spoke of London, the city where she first found success, with warm nostalgia.
For years, Hussein said, she hasn’t been able to tour or find stable work in Toronto. In recent months, she’s experienced bouts of homelessness, moving between her family home and city shelters. She’s eager to get the new album out, and maybe perform live again, but stability has remained elusive.
She needs to find a way to make money, she told me, so she can escape “this dreadful-ass city.”
Hussein was born in Toronto, and raised in Etobicoke alongside six siblings. Her parents, immigrants from Somalia, worked low-paying jobs: her dad drove a taxi and her mom worked at the Toronto Star cafeteria.
Growing up, her home was filled with sound — Somali and Arabic music from Egypt, mostly. Her father was a musician back home, and had a short stint as a member of Iftin Band, a beloved musical group from Mogadishu that combined funk, R&B, benga and more.
After high school, to appease her parents, Hussein enrolled at U of T, where she (half-heartedly) studied English literature. The name Cold Specks is lifted from Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil lights shining in the darkness.”
Hussein was into alt-country and indie music, but everything changed following a trip to Sonic Boom, a classic Toronto record shop, where she picked up three albums that revolutionized her taste: Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark,” Sam Cooke’s “Live at the Harlem Square Club” and James Carr’s “Goldwax Sessions.”
Hussein was immediately drawn to the raw vocal power and emotional dynamism of soul music, but it was Carr — a lesser-known Memphis-based vocalist who suffered from bipolar disorder — who would consume her.
“I worshipped him,” she said. “I said to myself, if I study this man, and I work hard, I can become the female version of him. I knew I had a raspy tone — a velvety tone that was unique to me. I just had to work.”
Following her musical revolution, she began skipping class and falling behind on her reading. The lonely piano in the Great Hall beckoned.
Hussein was in her early 20s when she moved to London. After her BBC appearance, success arrived quickly.
Her debut album, “I Predict a Graceful Expulsion,” received widespread critical acclaim — Pitchfork called it a comforting record, “the kind you cradle like a chipped mug of tea in a heatless apartment” — and landed on the Polaris Music Prize longlist. (She was also nominated at the 2013 Juno Awards for breakout artists of the year, but lost to the Weeknd.)
Subsequent Cold Specks albums — 2014’s “Neuroplasticity” and 2017’s “Fool’s Paradise” — expanded on the sparse sound of her debut, incorporating elements of electronica and contemporary indie rock. Both were also well-received by critics — “Neuroplasticity” also landed a Polaris nomination — but they failed to live up to Hussein’s standards.
“I would very much like to remove those albums from my catalog,” she told me. Even her first album was not fully formed, she insisted. “I was very young, and I was still discovering how to sing. I didn’t know how to play guitar, either, and everything was in the same key.”
For fans, imperfection was part of Cold Speck’s appeal. For Hussein, it became a motivational force.
“I’ve always wanted to make a classic album,” she said. “That has been my greatest desire since I started making music.”
In 2018, Hussein returned to Toronto after a three-month international tour failed to attract much success. During that time, her mind “unravelled,” she wrote in a harrowing Toronto Life essay about her psychotic break.
Following her hospitalization, she found both hope and stability by writing music. She was fragile, but ready to start over.
“I lost everything,” she told the Star at the time. “To be doing what I love again it’s been really, really good for the soul.”
Later that year, Hussein reached out to Mute Records, the esteemed UK record label that had released the first two Cold Specks albums, and expressed interest in starting work on new songs. Joff Gladwell, an A&R scout for the label, said they were keen to have her back. “We felt there was ‘unfinished business’ with Ladan and that for various reasons we hadn’t made an album together that truly captured how incredible and raw her voice is live,” he told me.
Unlike her previous two albums, Hussein wanted to record a project that sounded stripped back and elemental, something that tapped into the raw power of soul forebears like Nina Simone and James Carr. For the first time, she began working with other songwriters, and letting go of control.
“I used to be really precious about holding on to as much song writing as possible, but then I remembered James Carr didn’t write ‘The Dark End of the Street,” she said, referencing what she calls the greatest song of all time.
The label set up a series of writing sessions in London. “Ladan was on fire,” Gladwell said.
But it was during a session in Bristol with producer Ali Chant and Adrian Utley — who Hussein described as “the greatest guitarist in the UK” — that things really started to gel.
“I thought she was utterly brilliant,” said Utley, whose work with the influential trip hop trio Portishead might also be dubbed “doom soul,” said over the phone from Bristol. “I very rarely hear a voice that connects with me in that way — aside from very famous people like Neil Young or Hope Sandoval — where I can just feel the music happening.”
With a green light from Mute, the fourth Cold Specks album was set to be recorded in the U.K. alongside Utley, Chant and a live band. But when the pandemic hit, the project came to a halt.
Back at home, Hussein’s creativity started to wane. On a whim, she sent a message to Kreviazuk, hoping to generate a spark.
Together, they co-wrote five songs that would end up on the Cold Specks album, including “How It Feels.” “Chantal helped me find the juice,” said Hussein.
Over the next few years, “Light for the Midnight” slowly took shape. Inspired by classic soul and ‘60s rock, Hussein sought out the best composers and session musicians she could find — pianist Johnny Spence, her friend Owen Pallett and Terry Edwards, a trumpeter and sax player best known for working with PJ Harvey — and started building out the Kreviazuk songs through a process she calls “bootleg production.” She recorded another batch of vocals in Toronto, and sent them off to Utley and Chant in Bristol, who built the arrangements and produced five more tracks remotely.
The result is a fascinating, dynamic record that swings between spirited alt-rock (“Venus in Pisces,” “Close Goodbye”) and sultry pop-soul (“Closer”), and contains several moments of heart-rending release.
“I thought I was done with the hurting,” Hussein belts during the climax of “Lovely Little Bones,” her voice trembling like a rope stretched to its tensile limit. She sings the line four times, as if repetition might chase away the demons. “It just creeps under my skin.”
“‘Light for the Midnight’ is my first classic album,” Hussein said. “It draws its light from every single individual in my seven sibling, two parent household — a light nobody else sees, which I shape into these melodies and songs.”
As our conversation wraps, I ask Hussein if she wants to tour again one day.
“I just want to make studio albums now,” she answered, comparing herself to a painter. “Can you imagine telling a painter they have to go on tour? They have to travel to Germany and replicate their painting live? It’s exhausting.”
But she’s already started working on a followup project inspired by classic blues and the Harlem Renaissance. Tentatively titled “Thaumaturgy,” it’s an album “about sheer frustration, anger and sadness.”
As I click off the recorder and prepare to leave the Great Hall, Hussein asks if I can snap a picture of her, with the piano in the background. She hands me her cracked cellphone, and strikes a pose. A genuine smile appears on her face. For a moment, she looks at peace.
