Backxwash won the Polaris Prize for her most recent album, last year’s ruthless God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. The Montreal rapper quickly followed it up with the Stigmata EP last August and is set to return next with I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses. The new LP features contributions from Sad13, clipping., Devi McCallion, and Ada Rook, who features on the album’s digitized, industrial title track.

Ghostly Kisses is the work of French-Canadian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Margaux Sauvé. Playing the violin since the age of 5, it was almost 20 years later that she began to write and sing her first songs. Now working with Louis-Étienne Santais - composer, producer, and pianist - together they create Ghostly Kisses’ haunting yet ultimately soothing sound; beautiful compositions wrapped around Margaux’s delicate vocal. Ghostly Kisses’ back catalogue has been streamed more than 40 million times across all digital platforms. Their song ‘Such Words’ amassed 50k Spotify plays on its day of release and ‘Empty Note’ was featured in Netflix TV series ‘The Rain’ (season 3, 2020) and ‘Skam Italia’ (season 4, 2020), while ‘Touch’ sound tracked a NAD electronics Master Series ad, all contributing to their continued ascension. ‘Never Let Me Go’ rapidly hit the 1 million Spotify plays mark, alongside ‘Stay’ being featured on New Music Friday US, UK and Canada, along with Ultimate Indie, All New Indie, Indie All Stars, and many more. Ghostly Kisses has spent the last year working on her first full-length album, due for release in January 2022 via Akira Records. A powerful accumulation of all that's come before, Heaven, Wait is an intricate, moving body of work.

The second foray into Séance Centre's “Speculative Ethnography” series is an icy and tender missive of glacial piano, ambient electronics, samples, treated sax, and drum machine rhythms from snowbound Canadians Joseph Shabason & Vibrant Matter (Kieran Adams).
Shabason and Adams have been collaborating for years, forming the production team behind the celebrated experimental synth pop trio Diana, but their relationship has often been fraught with creative tension. Fly Me to the Moon is their ‘make up’ EP, a redemptive voyage through uncertain times. During lockdown Adams found refuge in routine, practicing drums every morning in Shabason’s Toronto studio. Afterwards, the pair would chat in the alleyway behind the studio, drinking espressos, a daily practice that became an antidote to the chaos of pandemic life. Through this daily ritual a creative spark was reignited and they decided to start exchanging ideas, but rather than working together in the studio as they had in the past, the circumstances required them to collaborate remotely. Through this distanced connection the youthful tension and ego of the past eroded, evolving into a deep trust.
Escaping the gravitational pull of a planet in... distress, the duo composed a sonic love letter adrift in weightless ambient electronics, fourth world jazz visions, and cyborg IDM riddim technologies — an ode to a long friendship which has strength because it has travelled through so many galaxies and vortices. Who says you can’t fall in love all over again - ‘Fly me to the moon / Let me play up there with those stars / Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars’.
Fly Me to the Moon is a limited edition pressing with risograph printed insert and designed for future archives.
RIYL: Ramzi, Photek, Mo Wax Headz, Jon Hassell, FSOL, Aleksi Perälä, Nuron, Ismistik more

The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is the group's sixth album and the first in more than 15 years to be released away from a certain midwestern American indie record company. After 2016's A Coliseum Complex Museum - which saw Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas attempting shorter, less sprawling songs - the Besnards and their label decided it was time to go their separate ways; with that decision came a question of whether to even continue the project at all. What use is a band with an instinct for long, tectonic tunes - rock songs with chthonic heft and ethereal grace, five or 10 or 18 minutes long? How do you sell that in an age of bite-sized streaming? How do you make it relevant?
"Who gives a shit!" the Besnard Lakes realized. Ignited by their love for each other, for playing music together, the sextet found themselves unspooling the most uncompromising recording of their career. Despite all its grandeur, ...The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings honours the very essence of punk rock: the notion that a band need only be relevant to itself. At last the Besnard Lakes have crafted a continuous long-form suite: nine tracks that could be listened together as one, like Spiritualized's Lazer Guided Melodies or even Dark Side of the Moon, overflowing with melody and harmony, drone and dazzle, the group's own unique weather.
Here now, the Besnard Lakes finally dispensed with the two/three-year album cycle, taking all the time they needed to conceive, compose, record and mix their opus. Some of its songs were old, resurrected from demos cast aside years ago. Others were literally woodshedded in the cabanon behind Lasek and Goreas's "Rigaud Ranch" - invented and reinvented, relishing this rougher sound. Some of that distortion makes its way into the final mix: an incandescent crackle that had receded from the Besnards' more recent output.
Rightly - nay, definitively! - The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is a double LP. "Near Death" is the title of the first side. "Death," "After Death," and "Life" follow next. It's literally a journey into (and back from) the brink: the story of the Besnard Lakes' own odyssey but also a remembrance of others', especially the death of Lasek's father in 2019. Being on your deathbed is perhaps the most psychedelic trip you can go on: in Lasek's father's case, he surfaced from a morphine dream to talk about "a window" on his blanket, with "a carpenter inside, making intricate objects." That experience pervades the album, catching fire on the song "Christmas Can Wait"; elsewhere the band pays tribute to the late Mark Hollis and, on "The Father of Time Wakes Up," they mourn the death of Prince.
In these scorched and pitted times, as the world smoulders, there might be nothing less trendy than an hour-long psych-rock epic by a band of Canadian grandmasters. Then again, there might be nothing we need more. ...The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is a bright-blazing requiem: nine tunes that are one tune and six musicians who make one band - unleashed and unconstrained, piercing and technicolour. At the end of the golden day, the Besnard Lakes are right where they should be.

Enigmatic Canadian prog-death metal unit BLACK DEATH CULT have completed work on their new album "Diaspora”, the follow-up to 2019’s “Devil’s Paradise”. With “Diaspora” BLACK DEATH CULT traverse even further into the hidden crevices of the Archaeaeon through six bizarre audial abnormalities of death metal strangeness and perplexity.

Kathleen Edwards is a Canadian singer-songwriter and musician. Her 2003 debut album, Failer, contained the singles "Six O'Clock News" and "Hockey Skates". Her next two albums – Back to Me and Asking for Flowers – both made the Billboard 200 list and reached the top 10 of Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart.

Frazey Ford, best known as the co-leader of beloved alt-folk band The Be Good Tanyas, returns with her second solo effort, Indian Ocean (October 14) -- a lush album filled with songs about pain and dealing with tough truths, but also about love, contrition and being bold. Part of what gives Indian Ocean its gilded edge is the work of Al Green’s band, The Hi Rhythm Section, the iconic architects of the famous singer's instrumental sound. There's affirmation in its 11 songs, as Ford's self-possession and passion puts flesh to the musical bones. Lead single “September Fields,” which premiered on NPR’s All Songs Considered, is available now on iTunes.

On their eighth album, the Canadian new wave torchbearers interrogate their career and mourn the death of a kind of rockstar success even as they celebrate their achievement of it.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band

Dose Curves, the first solo outing for Montreal-based harpist Sarah Pagé, is perfectly strange and stable. Like an entirely detailed, delectable world in a spin of its own, the album moves, breathes, grows and changes at a pace that feels wonderfully natural; in welcoming ways that belie its intricate oddities. Across the five-track suite, all recorded live in motion, Pagé unfurls untold possibilities from within the 5000-year-old instrument. Moving through free-form tonal caverns, catching gently-bent melodic breezes and expanding out to the ambient aethers, Dose Curves is a spellbinding debut that affirms its maker as one of Canada’s most versatile and accomplished experimentalists.
Sarah Pagé - harps, pedals, amps
Engineered and Mixed by Thierry Amar at Hotel2Tango, Montreal
Mastered by Harris Newman at Greymarket Mastering
Artwork by Sarah Pagé
Graphic design by LOKI
Thanks to Jonah and my friends, family and teachers for their loving support.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada and Canada's private radio broadcasters. Nour reconnaissons l'appui financier du gouvernement du Canada et des radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.