New Music
Introducing Thea May, New Signing to Ishkōdé Records
By Markus Hamence
New Single F*ck You For Dying out today
Brought to You by Tragedy EP Arrives 21 March, 2025
New dynamo Thea May announces her signing to Ishkōdé Records with a major statement EP, Brought to You by Tragedy, introduced today with the first new song, “Fck You For Dying.” Simmering and shimmering with equal parts rage and hope, “F U for Dying” overloads its own emotional circuits, exploding through to the other side of loss. A cathartic anthem for anyone navigating an unfinished goodbye, “Fck You For Dying” is here to normalize grief and honour the pain of loss – loudly – in the way only rock can. The full EP, Brought to You by Tragedy arrives on March 21, 2025 on Ishkode Records.
“Ishkōdé Records is so excited to introduce the world to Thea May. Thea, like her, music is a force of nature, bursting at the seams with uncontainable energy and talent,” says Ishkōdé co-founder ShoShona Kish. “She is the voice that rock and roll doesn’t know it needs, an earthquake of raw and unflinching emotion, truth and courage. She will shake the foundations and then just as easily rebuild them. The Ishkōdé Aunties couldn’t be more proud to be on this journey with her.”
Located between prevailing sentiments of self care and don’t care, Brought to You by Tragedy is a riveting and unflinching look at catastrophic loss, and what comes next. “Thank you for what you put me through,” sings May in “F*ck You For Dying,” an ultra-raw take on the unasked-for strengthening of character that comes in the aftermath of devastation.
“None of this music should exist, but it does,” says May. “This song was inspired by my unfinished business. When someone you love dies at an untimely age, you would take any time back, even the fights and the hard times, in a heartbeat. This song is an ode to inevitably gaining from your pain, the frustration that it brings having to continue forward.”
The accompanying video shows a journey through real-life healing places, where memory and reality blur. A raw and unfiltered tribute to grief in its most human form—rage, longing, and the surreal feeling of existing without someone who should still be here— the passenger seat isn’t just empty, it’s haunted, a reminder, a wound. In the clip, Thea May talks to her ghosts, smokes with them, screams into the void that holds everything and nothing at once.
The land catches, holds and heals. This is grief without apology. This is love refusing to let go.
ABOUT THEA MAY
“ima mix of water, grunge and glam
healing out loud in front of the world
I try and meditate but it’s been a minute
I will never be okay, but I’m gonna be okay. Ya feel me?”
Don’t bother with anything but honesty with Thea May. An emo kid at heart, the Anishnawbe artist from Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, near Sudbury, ON, makes music because she has to. As a child, singing, dancing and performing was driven by impulse, an inner force of truth that found its way out. Now as an adult, May is a songwriter finding her purpose, or more accurately, understanding the purpose that found her. “My artist journey hurts sometimes, but it’s healing and it’s important that I am here to share this with the world,” says May.
Mining, both as a metaphor for the emotional depths explored in her songs, and an actual day job for a time, is a handy prompt to consider what it might be like to be in May’s position, an artist out of instinct, raw talent, and out of necessity. There’s something very precious within. “We bare our souls so you don’t have to, we provide safe space in an unsafe place. I’m grateful to be able to connect with people who share pain in this world.”
A kindred bridge enthusiast, May is determined to craft her own distinct eras, starting now with an EP that establishes her powerful voice and clear directive. Offered to others for the same reason she does it herself, for May, music is a place of renewal: “I am on this journey for every version of me that suffered, I am on this journey for every person who fears that sadness and darkness are all that exists, I am on this journey to normalize a path we all walk.” Brought to You by Tragedy, Thea May’s powerful entrance, is a thrilling, thrashing, compelling and compassionate work of love.
