Northern Dial Artist Profile

Coleman Hell

Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

Thunder Bay-raised songwriter and producer Coleman Hell found an unlikely route into mainstream pop by combining acoustic folk textures with electronic production. His 2015 single "2 Heads" built its hook around banjo-like picking and a propulsive dance beat, a mixture that sounded distinct from the dominant EDM-pop formulas around it. The song became a major crossover, earning quadruple-platinum certification in Canada and gold status in the United States while accumulating a global streaming audience.

Hell followed that breakthrough with the 2016 album Summerland, released through 604 Records and Columbia. Singles including the platinum "Fireproof" and gold "Devotion" showed that "2 Heads" was not simply a novelty, while Hell received a 2016 JUNO nomination for Breakthrough Artist of the Year and Summerland was nominated for Pop Album of the Year the following year. The record leaned into the tension between electronic pop and folk-derived instrumentation that had made his first hit immediately recognizable.

After stepping back from the intensity of that breakout period, Hell continued releasing independently and revisiting the boundaries of his sound. His 2024 album JOYRIDE moved more freely among pop, rock and electronic ideas rather than attempting to reproduce "2 Heads." Hell's place in Canadian pop is tied to that willingness to make a strange combination commercially legible: a Thunder Bay artist turned folk signifiers, modern production and sharply compressed pop writing into one of the country's most distinctive mid-2010s crossover hits.