Cherry Pick - :3
Beyond its emotional depth and the musical fluency on full display within, :3 is an expertly-crafted EP; full of the kind of texture and nuance that’d make any audiophile blush. Long story short: spin this EP ‘til the grooves wear out, sure; but go see Cherry Pick – it’s believin’. Trust me.
Abigail Lapell - Shadow Child
Different seasons represent different points of our lives, which Lapell conveys through colours and images in her lyrics. The warmth of this record reminds me of the leaves in the fall.
AMRITA - S/T
Blending classical North Indian music with modal jazz, the output is a synthesis of harmonies that fuse rhythm, tone, and structure. I’m particularly enamoured by their name; “amrita” is the Sanskrit word for a nectar promising immortality.
Hoopla - Weird Nightmare
What is this beautiful power pop? Alex Edkins can actually sing? Are those honest to goodness hooks that aren’t buried under an endless wave of metallic feedback? Am I losing my mind here? No, this is real and it’s so good.
Big Evil Rat - Big Evil Rat
The solid rhythm, cascading fuzz delays, and warm rock and roll organ are familiar but welcoming garage rock territory. The band’s not reinventing the wheel, by any means. The real payoff is their distinct musical sound, their specific timbre and swagger, their characteristic spooky resonance and vice-tight ensemble playing; harmony decomposed into volatile compounds, the emergent property that is Big Evil Rat.
Pre-Breaker - Self-Titled
Pre-Breaker’s titular album is one hell of a debut. It comes in hard and serves as a cathartic release for those who find themselves troubled by corporate greed, the horror of war, and the police state.
Evil Ebenezer & C-Lance - Steroid Era
Evil Ebenezer is a Vancouver-based rapper with a grimy flow and a battle tested delivery, whose new album, Steroid Era, uses the great game of baseball as a metaphor for striving for authenticity in a complicated industry. His flow and cadence drips with confidence, as he swaggers through battles and tribulations, skin thick and calloused, toughened and creased, like a perfectly broken-in catcher’s mitt.
Ellen Froese - Solitary Songs
Solitary Songs exists in the mercy of its own brilliant means, with a magical, fated quality. If you’re looking for a record that combines the collaborative warmth of a tight-knit prairie community with the solitary, cosmic searching of a brilliant songwriter, do not pass this one by. It’s a masterclass in modern folk melancholy, and it deserves a permanent home on your turntable.
Zoon - Happy Thought School
By wrapping deeply alienated lyricism in laid-back rhythms, shimmering guitars, and sunny production, Zoon doesn't just look back at childhood trauma. Instead, they squeeze a vital, survivalist beauty right out of it.
Flore Laurentienne - Volume III
As a whole, the album tells a vivid story. To me, it felt like listening to an ancient tree recounting its life from a single spot in the forest: growing from a sapling to a dilapidated, fungal log, enduring fierce floods and burning fires, until at the end of it all, something new emerges.
Trevor Sloan - Sparrows Sing While Leaves Decay
Sloan’s poetic sentiments, captivating songwriting and delicate voice hold our hand through these changing seasons and life lessons as summer ends and the leaves begin to fall.
Kaeley Jade - The Great Unknown
I am inspired by Jade’s vulnerability as she explores the deepest parts of herself while also discussing the beauty of love. This record is timeless and relatable, conveying how music can change your life for the better. It is a reminder to live life one day at a time, and that the journey of self-growth is ongoing.
Masahiro Takahashi - In Another
Beautiful and occasionally unsettling, “In Another” is an album fit for any fans of the ambient, the jazzy, and the experimental.
The Talbot Trail Boys - S/T
With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Henry Adam Svec creates parallel Canadian universes, ones in which football players write love songs, AI-bots compose remarkable Canadiana, and rural families withhold secrets from a folklorist and song collector. In his many worlds, history melts into fantasy, tragedy melts into comedy, past melts into future, and music is the only constant. Maybe there’s a bigger metaphor there, but I won’t connect the dots, and neither will Henry.
Tired Cossack - ZIMA
In a sense, ZIMA is not simply a record about survival. It is the sound of survival in progress. In its kineticism, or perhaps because of it, ZIMA also bears a certain enduring persistence, running defiantly alongside its bleak underscoring. And what is survival if not persistence in the face of annihilation – of the self, or even, of reality itself?
Truster - Creeping Thing
Bringing an unapologetically raw and untamed energy, this hard-hitting album also brings with it a unique restrained softness, a dim light amidst the darkness, but as you approach the light rows of sharp teeth reveal themselves, waiting to swallow you whole. Accept your fate and allow yourself to be cast into the dark abyss of human emotion that is Truster’s Creeping Thing.
Broken Social Scene - Remember The Humans
As with every full-length BSS release, the album cannot be reduced to single songs – it’s meant to be experienced as an album, played front to back. The songs are connected to each other lyrically, musically, threaded together through a kind of sonic language that more than 20 years as a band, collective, and chosen family can share. I’m so glad they’re back.
Edwin Raphael - I Know A Garden
…like a coming-of-age story told backwards, where we begin in the present and dream up the past as the story continues.
Average Weekends - Beached Out
Beached Out brandishes their hard-earned wreaths and scars as they forge a path forward on Average Weekends, cautiously hopeful about a future that has invariably been shaped by the past, for better or worse.
Sea of Lettuce - Open Doors EP
There’s an uncertainty when presented with a band name like “Sea of Lettuce”; should I expect a mathcore alt-metal extravaganza? Avant garde prog-rock kids music? I can’t say I was surprised when I heard jangly, slacker-pop delivered with the airy precision of soft rock on the Open Doors EP released in April. These are sentimental songs grounded in strong songwriting and seriously tight playing.