Art-Popper Celogen Wrestles with Grief, God, and Glitter on Answer Me Smartass
Some albums whisper, others wail. Answer Me Smartass, the seventh full-length from Calgary’s Dominic Demierre under his solo art-pop moniker Celogen, doesn’t choose. It’s a liminal howl, equal parts lullaby and exorcism, tethered by the cracked but defiant voice of someone who’s barely holding on—and somehow building symphonies anyway.
Demierre—Celogen’s sole member, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist—emerges from a period of intense personal crisis.
“To be frank,” he writes, “Answer Me Smartass comes out of trying to figure out why you’d carry on. Why you’d bother to choose life.”
It’s a record forged in hospitals, real and metaphorical: his father’s near-fatal heart infection, a friend’s psychiatric admission, and his own time in crisis stabilization. Instead of yielding silence, he made music—a dense, mercurial, genre-elusive work that tackles trauma, hope, and human absurdity with unflinching precision.
On “Strange Ravenous Light”, Demierre channels the scorched ache of In Utero-era Nirvana.
“You’ve seen the sinner, sobbing, bled dry / You’ve seen the saint caught in your headlights,” he sings, his voice trembling on the edge of collapse. The production is unrelenting—detuned guitars scrape against glitched-out percussion and ghostly harmonies. “I parasite through the telephone / I pump you full of kidney stones,” he growls, desperate and grotesque. It’s the sound of someone trying to claw their way out of the dark.
The second single, “Sauntering Towards Immunity”, slathers existential dread in glammy dissonance and sci-fi gospel. “For this is my machine of sweat / And this its hot influenza,” Demierre chants, collapsing the language of illness, theology, and technopop into a fever dream of mortality and desire.
“It was me grappling with my dad’s brush with death,” he explains. “But also… trying to understand what makes life worth surviving. Why bother trusting anything?”
It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s an SOS set to warped dancefloor beats and choral synths that glitch like sunspots.
But it’s “Meadowlark”—a shimmering, spectral ballad—that offers the album’s softest blow. Inspired by a friend’s psychiatric hospitalization and echoing the intimate grief of Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, the track is almost sacred in its gentleness.
“Astraeus, will you hear my fragile plea?” he asks, invoking Greek and Shinto deities to safeguard his friend’s soul. When Demierre sings “I tilt your heart toward the sun / Toward the song, the meadowlark of love,” the track becomes an invocation of something bigger than pain. “I played it for her,” he says, “and when I looked up, she and our friend were in tears. I remember thinking—good. It worked.”
That balance of heartbreak and humour—Answer Me Smartass, after all—is crucial to Demierre’s ethos. The album’s title nods to the way trauma and intimacy blur into absurdity. The liner notes feel like half-confession, half-performance art: “Hope in a crew-neck t-shirt, something I can cling to, afraid… I tried, I really did.” Through dense imagery and studio wizardry, he turns personal wounds into collective invitations: to grieve louder, to love harder, to not be afraid of looking ridiculous in the face of the void.
Demierre’s resume is fittingly eclectic. A former drummer in Calgary’s post-punk and emo circuits, he founded Celogen in 2018 as a way to “cut loose from readymade aesthetics.” His past releases have wandered through funk, industrial, baroque folk, and surreal showtunes, all stitched together by his love of jazz harmony, McCartney’s melodies, and the DIY production ethos of Prince and Trent Reznor. He calls each record “a diary of what went wrong and what went right that year.” Answer Me Smartass is the most emotionally raw yet compositionally sophisticated entry in that timeline.
The artwork, by Winona Julian, reflects that same tension: stark, smeared neon, like a shrine built on a napkin. Inside are liner notes that read like fevered poetry, teetering between revelation and delusion. The album is entirely self-produced, self-played, and self-mixed in his bedroom—a place where, as he puts it, “I try to touch the mystery. Because you endure it all just to get to care, ever, about anything.”
Hi, Dominic! Good to see you again! How’s the summer treating you?
Fair’s absolutely fair, not too shabby all told. Thanks for asking. I’m in the midst of moving house as I write this, which has me feeling remarkably keen to see how autumn turns out. Somehow, July is never my month, but August and I are getting on famously.
You’ve said the album comes from asking why someone would “bother to choose life.” How did making Answer Me Smartass change your own answer to that question?
The truth, morbid though it may be, is that I didn’t have an answer. I was trying for months and months to write my way out of uncertainty. Depression and despair come and go, as does any human experience, but they leave behind a lingering spectre that continues to haunt. It was the one-two punch at the start of 2024 – the awful low I endured, followed by my father’s hospitalization – that shook me something rotten, and even as the events themselves faded away, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was fundamentally wrong that they had happened.
I look back on my notebooks from last year, and I see a thread running through: forgiveness. I think we all want that – it’s so lonely to be in any form of sadness, and yet into each life some rain must fall. We’re all that extra bit further from each other for the anguish we can’t and won’t express. We all want to be assured that it’s not our fault, that adversity doesn’t reflect on ourselves and our own hopes in life. But who or what tells you that? I sing at one point about a dying girl in a dream of love, and that’s genuinely how I felt. There may be loss all around us, at all times, but through the miracle of closeness, there’s the chance to reconcile with that.
That’s really where the final three or four songs all come from. I think now that after that period, I was always going to write songs like Meadowlark and Clementine. I had to – I needed to recognize how it would feel to others if I left this life behind. There’s your answer, after all: you endure what you must endure, because you get to be a part of something much bigger than yourself.
Each song feels like it exists between grief and absurdity—how do you decide when to lean into humour versus vulnerability in your songwriting?
In practice, the absurdity enters into the songs naturally. I don’t think I sit down trying to be funny – that would require my jokes to ever be funny – more that I get carried away as I write. The more you really lean into and dig through these human experiences, the more you realize there’s something intrinsically ridiculous about it. Meat sacks on a ball of rock that are made to make more meat sacks, and we’re sad about it. Forgive me if I oversimplify, but at a certain point, you really might.
That’s not a bad thing, though. There’s relief, ultimately, when grief can be absurd. Sometimes it can’t, and that’s a far more dire place to be. After all, the better part of the humour in the record comes from singing about myself. A song like Strange Ravenous Light was born of a terribly desperate place, but in hindsight, the lyrics have their comedy. I can’t help but smirk at a line like “with ipecac and opioids, I’ve never felt so overjoyed”. Maybe it’s a dry humour, but again, for anything else, I’d need my jokes to be funny.
The reason songs like Moth Rap or Sauntering Towards Immunity are so abstract is because they’re really studying my own response to jealousy and loneliness. That reveals something – I must not take myself as seriously as I take other people. My therapist might have a field day with that, but perhaps it tracks. I know where my own grievances are coming from, and I know how they’re displayed versus how I think they should be displayed, and I know how preposterous that all is.
“Meadowlark” has such a sacred intimacy to it. What was it like to share that song with the friend who inspired it?
It was a sort of atonement. I’ve had my fair share of hopelessness. I remember how critical it was that she didn’t feel quite so alone – I know what that’s like.
It’s so strange to see a human being as they are not. I knew, and still know, somebody bright, vivacious, full of wonder and hope and passion. There can be no question about it. Yet that is not who I was singing to. I remember so vividly the thick atmosphere of anxiety and confusion in that little apartment. I blame the hospital wristbands. We are not built to see those in the people we love, nor are we built to wear them.
But I started playing it anyway, and it’s even stranger still, because when I opened my eyes, I saw the person I didn’t know. Right there, crying. I’d felt so very helpless. Roses are cute, but they came from a store, and it’s nothing to do with me, realistically. Meanwhile, I’d never worked so hard on a song in my life. I like to say that by the time she heard it, she was the only person I knew who hadn’t heard it seventeen times. I was so scared I’d mess it up.
This is where I have to be careful. The song didn’t solve her problems – I am not capable of that. But I remember the rest of the evening she seemed just that little bit lighter, even if it was only for an evening. She grabbed my guitar and started singing by herself. I thought – that’s alright, then. I’ve done what I can do, and it’s good.
The production is entirely self-contained in your bedroom. What does that environment allow you to do creatively that a studio might not?
More than anything, it allows me to tear songs apart. I’m constantly floored by how a song needs to sound, and it’s incredibly rare I find that out on the first try. Honestly, my hard drive is a mess of take 2s and abandoned projects. I can never clean it up, either, because this idea that I had in 2021 might have finally fit with an idea I had in 2023, and I’d be a fool to promise that won’t happen again.
I don’t meaningfully know anything about sound design. I only know when a sound is finished. I could never convince a studio to take on all my audio processing software, because most of it comes from websites that haven’t been updated since 2005, and some of it I have to work gingerly with before it crashes my computer.
That’s so much of the fun, though. I’ve been told my work is tricky to categorize, and that’s not me setting out to be as difficult as I usually am – it’s me actively discovering what a song I wrote can do. It all starts on a guitar or a piano, but you’ve heard those before. What does it sound like on a sample of Rock the Casbah that I’ve slowed down to 50 BPM, reversed, and dripped through 4 corrosive acids?