If you allow yourself to be swept away by the referential riffs, the sultry crooning, the smouldering aches and vague promises of this self-designed loverboy, you will no doubt be left panting (and possibly pants-less) and wanting more.  Calvin Love is a true savant, who celebrates with grand indulgence to capture grand feeling.

At times pensive and ethereal, while at others brash and jagged, Spiritual Content builds on the band’s already strong oeuvre to create their most complex, conceptual album to date. Krauty as ever, but with the growing confidence to show their vulnerabilities, Sunglaciers invite the listener to join the steady march of progress - not as a walk of the plank, but as a dance down the hall.

Hurts Like Hell is another shining example that Charlotte Cornfield is a national treasure. She can pen a love song to rival the greatest, and her peculiar eye for odd details makes her one of the most original songwriting voices working today. Cornfield’s foray into motherhood has gifted her with wisdom and a new, less self-focused perspective that comes through in her lyrics. This doesn’t make her come across as pretentious or dogmatic, though, and she still impresses upon the listener that she’s one of us. She is still tumbling through life, feeling all the bruises that are left behind. She is still hurting like hell, but these songs offer a resilient hope for the future.

Something We All Got is an album that has a cinematic ambiance to it. I am not saying this is quite an atmospheric soundtrack, but that it captures those moments of life that you just want to get a snapshot of. It feels like cootie catch achieved exactly what they set themselves out to do, by creating the sharper edges of their rough-around-the-edges sound.

Listening to femtanyl feels like a rush of aggro movement. Abrasive and thriving in all of its intensity, femtanyl is the Toronto digital hardcore act by Noelle Stockwood, now joined by multi-instrumentalist Juno Callender.

In its heart, Amaryllis feels like a remedy for unresolved heartbreak; a letter to a former lover, an old friend, somebody you wished was still there but isn’t. The sense of incompleteness portrayed in both the sense of the lo-fi, DIY recording style and lyrical themes of the album work in the band’s favour as it reinforces the themes of loss, change, and the uneasy clarity that can come with both.

For their first release of 2026, OwnSound Recordings dropped Anemomaniacs, the debut album from Winnowing on January 8th. Winnowing’s DNA can be traced back to Thresher, an improvisational post-rock jazz quartet who dabble in collage-style albums stitched together from collections of free-form debauchery. Winnowing is the result of alternative band lineups and swapped instrument sessions that introduce even more freedom and chaos to their approach.

Best of Our Possible Lives balances the duality of incredibly heavy, philosophical lyrical themes with the ease of a man who is starting to see the world for what it really is, while still taking the time to crack a joke at every opportunity. Even the album title is a play on several literary and philosophical tropes, but in the end, Boy Golden is not trying to find anything more than love and good times. 

Musicians hold multitudes in them. In some cases, you might find an artist is a member of wildly different acts. Perhaps they have an alternative creative practice that they devote themselves to just as much as music. And in the case of Jeff Cancade, one might say that they hold two wolves inside of them… okay, more like a gentle delicate cat and a rowdy wolf inside of them.

Aquakultre is the musical alias of Lance Sampson, an artist based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. His newest album, 1783, is an astounding work of art - a multi-genre concept album chronicling the history of his ancestors, Black Loyalists who were promised freedom after fighting for the British during the American Revolutionary War.

Bluebløøds is a small posse of Winnipeg hitmakers who craft such devilishly clever house-infused pop bangers, you will no doubt be scanning the physical landscape of our frozen crust-belt, scratching your head as to the source of their magic.  Such a seamless blend of house, funk, soul, RnB, hip hop, glitch-pop, with the lyrical sensibility straight outta…Portage Place, Flin Flon, Cross Lake? Huh?  How did our local MLAs not warn us of this?  How did the security guards at Portage Place not take notice?  How did they pull this off? 

At its core, Significance, Otherness works its way through an underlying philosophical question: How are the ways in which we find meaning / significance / purpose tied to what is other than ourselves? Today, there is a pervasive individualistic outlook that suggests that meaning is self-made, so letting the other in becomes a compromise to its authenticity. However, Burs offers a musical challenge to this contemporary inclination by suggesting that significance and otherness are in fact two sides of the same coin.

The beauty of the record is the sense of catharsis and community Home Front creates. We’re all suffering, and there are injustices everywhere. There’s a lot to grieve, and a lot to be angry about. But by embracing the anger and the loss, and treating it with equal parts tenderness and frustration, Home Front offers maybe a place to belong and create something beautiful in the cracks of all that’s crumbling.