Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
To date, there have been 84 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, Miss the Heart is the New Music Monday highlight!
Miss the Heart is a Victoria-based alternative/pop-rock duo that was born out of the ashes of its members’ former band.
The band is comprised of Kiarra O’Connor on vocals and Michael Voytash on drums, who together used to play in local band Shale.
O’Connor and Voytash’s collaboration goes all the way back to high school.
“Back when I was in high school, Michael was doing tech for our musical theatre company in Sooke,” O’Connor told Victoria Buzz.
“I was in my Grade 12 year playing Sandy in Grease. He saw me on the stage and thought it would be a good fit to form a band.”
She noted that a couple iterations of bands formed from that connection, and years later, it led the two to start Miss the Heart.
“We have gained a lot of knowledge from our previous projects and we were ready to start something with a little more intention and commercial viability—something more thought through.”
The duo spent two years writing, recording and getting ready to launch before releasing their first single, “Don’t U Dare” in April of this year.
Following that release, Miss the Heart put out a second single, “Numb Me Out,” in May, before releasing their latest song, “Know Me Better.”
Ultimately, O’Connor says that the hope is that these three tracks will become part of a larger release—either a full-length album or an EP.
“My working title for the future EP or album is I’m Not Angry,” she laughed.
“Really clearly, in every song, I’m pretty upset about something touching on anger, so I think that will be the underlying theme whether or not it’s a sad song or a happy song.”
O’Connor noted that these songs are coming from a place of feminine rage and all the emotions that come with dealing with that rage.
She says many of her songs came from a place of confronting a personal period of grief.
“Dealing with a lot of emotions and needing to find a therapeutic release through writing was helpful in general,” explained O’Connor.
“It’s not that the theme of the future album will be grief, but I feel like it’s almost just too heavy of a topic, so it’s nice to deal with all the emotions that surround that main topic in other ways.”
Miss the Heart’s songs are entirely written by the duo, with Voytash playing drums, guitar, bass and keyboards on their demo tracks before the songs are taken to their producer, Ryan Worsley at Echoplant Recording Studios in Vancouver, who helps them flesh out and refine their sound.
“Luckily [Worsley] is a very accomplished guitar and bass player, so he took all our demoed versions and basically polished them and made them sound a little bit better,” said O’Connor.
She added that for their live shows, they will be bringing on some friends who will play alongside them.
“The project Miss the Heart is just the duo of me and Michael and we’re going to keep it that way,” she continued. But when we perform live, it’ll be a full-blown rock show.
Highlight track – “Know Me Better”
O’Connor says that she and Voytash wrote the song together about “being played.”
“They’re taking advantage of you, and you kind of let it happen for a time—maybe because you’re naive or because you look for the best in people, but you don’t realize until a little while later that you’ve been played, used or taken advantage of,” she explained.
“Then there’s kind of this coming too of reclaiming that power back and really being able to turn it around—it’s kind of about that catharsis of calling it out as it is after that realization.”
O’Connor pointed specifically to the line in the song, “you narcissist,” being especially fun and cathartic to sing.
She noted that although this song may seem to be about a scorned lover at first listen, that isn’t necessarily what it is intended to be about.
“It sounds like the song is coming from the place of a boyfriend [who] screwed me over, but that is not the case,” she laughed.
“It is just a general person kind of screwing you over, and it just so happens to take a relationship tone to it. It’s kind of like, just a general ‘f you’ narcissist anthem for anybody whose had someone screw them over in the past.”
“Could be a boyfriend, could be a boss, could be a family member, it could be literally anyone in your life,” she added.
Check out “Know Me Better” by Miss the Heart below:
Listen to “Know Me Better” and the rest of Miss the Heart’s catalogue on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.
Currently, Miss the Heart is doing a little radio promotion acoustic tour as a duo, playing at radio stations such as CFUV and The Zone @ 91-3, but is planning some full-band shows soon.
In late August, they will be making their debut with a full band in Vancouver at The Ventura Room.
Although they have no gigs lined up in Victoria at the moment, O’Connor says they will be looking to play one very soon.
Aside from getting their first shows under their belt, Miss the Heart is headed back into the studio to record some more tracks that will be released later this year, or in early 2027.
Keep an eye on Miss the Heart’s Instagram to stay up to date on future shows and releases.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Hawk & Steel release first album after 9-year hiatus
- New Music Monday: Hillsboro confronts addiction struggles on sophomore album release
- New Music Monday: Northcote embraces heartbreak on new album ‘To Cherish’
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“I actually am a UVic graduate so I really love CFUV,” said O’Connor.
“The Basement Sessions that we just did was incredibly meaningful to us because it was our very first radio show and it was the first radio station that got back to us and took us seriously—we felt super welcomed.”
She noted that Miss the Heart will definitely be back in the Basement Sessions for a full-band show as soon as they can.
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Miss the Heart in the comments below!
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