Hamilton, Ontario singer-songwriter and guitarist Matty Simpson shares “Explode,” a restless, emotionally charged single that blends the raw energy of grunge and punk with the introspective storytelling of Americana and roots rock. Caught between exhilaration and uncertainty, the track explores the overwhelming nature of love and the fear of surrendering control.

Inspired by a period of listening to both heavier rock bands and introspective singer-songwriters, “Explode” emerged from Simpson’s desire to bridge those musical worlds. The title comes from the lyric, “you made my heart explode,” capturing feelings so powerful that they become both beautiful and destabilizing.

“It was an attempt to write a love song and be more positive during a phase where I was writing mostly about sadness and heartbreak,” Simpson explains. “It ended up being about someone who is so deeply in love, that it is debilitating and even self-destructive. Love can be that way, too. Love is complex and so is writing about it.”

That emotional push and pull shapes the song’s arrangement. Its heavier, grunge-inspired passages contrast with quieter moments that leave room for reflection. One of Simpson’s favourite lyrics, “Hey, don’t talk so loud, I’m trying to hear the softest sound,” arrives after a loud chorus crescendo, creating a shift that emerged naturally during the songwriting process.

“I think it has a great dynamic effect that was never planned and was discovered after the song was in existence,” he shares.

Despite its heavier influences, “Explode” follows Simpson’s commitment to keeping the songwriting at the forefront. Inspired by the directness of artists like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Nirvana, he favours arrangements that deliver emotional impact without unnecessary embellishment.

“The song has to come first and be great on its own,” Simpson explains.

“Explode” appears on his upcoming full-length album, Sky Breaks at Dawn, which explores healing, love, perseverance, and the passage of time. Across the record, he considers the tension between uncertainty and acceptance, recognizing that time can offer both renewal and decline. Within that larger narrative, “Explode” reflects the importance of embracing life’s experiences, even when their outcomes remain unknown.

Halifax artist and producer Katharine Fountain introduces her solo project with “When Good Girls Go Bad,” a dark, cinematic electronic pop single exploring the loss of innocence and identity in the aftermath of trauma. The track marks the first release from her forthcoming Dark Days EP, a deeply personal collection written while navigating grief, destructive coping mechanisms, and the search for oneself following profound loss. Pairing shadowy, visceral beats with lush, atmospheric production, the single captures the emotional weight of shame and the struggle to recognize oneself after life has been irrevocably altered.

Written during a period when Fountain felt increasingly disconnected from herself, “When Good Girls Go Bad” emerged from the realization that the coping mechanisms she had turned to were only deepening her pain. Overwhelmed by shame and the weight of unspoken experiences, she began questioning how she had strayed so far from the person she once knew.

“I no longer recognized the face I saw in the mirror and asked myself where I went wrong,” Fountain explains, pointing to the question at the heart of the chorus: I’d like to know where they go when good girls go bad.

Written and produced by Fountain herself, the final recording retains much of the original demo she created several years earlier, combining its foundational synths and programmed drums with organic instrumentation. A Fazioli grand piano, performed by Dean Holbrough, and powerful live drums from Sekou Lumumba add depth and intensity to the electronic arrangement.

Drawn to the richness of blending analogue and electronic sounds, Fountain carefully builds tension through melody and arrangement, allowing the instrumentation to mirror the vulnerability and drama of the lyrics. Her vocals shift between ethereal fragility and commanding power, making the production an essential part of the song’s emotional storytelling.

Written in the years following the death of her only sibling to suicide, Dark Days explores depression, abusive relationships, and the search for comfort in harmful places. The EP became a way for Fountain to process experiences she had struggled to articulate, transforming a period of profound emotional upheaval into an intimate musical narrative.

Having found comfort in music during some of her loneliest moments, Fountain hopes her own work can offer that same sense of understanding to others. “I hope that someone will listen to my music and feel seen.”

Toronto-based duo MOONRIIVR return with “Lady Of The Lake,” a moody, indie single that blends slow-motion surf rock with mournful saxophones and haunting guitar textures. Exploring emotional stagnation and moving forward, the track is the latest offering from their forthcoming sophomore album, expected in early 2027.

The song began with a musical foundation written by Champagne James Robertson, which immediately resonated with bandmate Gavin Gardiner. As Gardiner developed the melodies and lyrics, he drew from a period of feeling emotionally stuck, turning the song into a personal reminder that new experiences and challenges still lie ahead.

“I was feeling very stuck in one place at the time emotionally so this song was a bit of a call to arms for myself,” Gardiner explains. “Realizing there’s still a world out there and that there are new challenges to face and finding beauty in that.”

Originally built around saxophone, floor tom, and voice, “Lady Of The Lake” evolved through live performances before taking shape in the studio. Its defining sound emerged by accident when the duo recorded Robertson’s guitar amplifier through a microphone positioned roughly 15 feet away in another room, still covered by a cloth dust bag.

“We were both quite taken by the ‘haunted’ sound of it and that became the north star for the recording,” Gardiner recalls.

The track also incorporates drum samples from a vintage Maestro Rhythm King, triggered by drummer Lyle Molzan’s performance. This combination of mechanical percussion and live playing adds a distinctive rhythmic character beneath the driving guitar and saxophones.

For MOONRIIVR, the recording reflects their instinctive approach to production. Rather than working toward a predetermined arrangement, the duo build layers and gradually strip them back until the song’s character comes into focus.

As the duo continue shaping their second album, “Lady Of The Lake” offers a glimpse into the next chapter of their creative partnership.Ad

Prince Edward Island singer-songwriter Shane Pendergast releases his fifth album, Jack Pine, a reflective collection of traditional folk songs rooted in history, nature, and the cycles that connect one generation to the next. Led by focus track “The Maiden Voyage,” the record finds Pendergast looking backward without becoming fixed in the past, considering what recurring patterns can reveal about the lives we are living now.

A constant songwriter, Pendergast realized the album was taking shape as a cohesive group of songs emerged alongside a period of playing with different musicians and becoming increasingly excited by the sounds they were creating together. Underneath those songs was an idea he continually found himself returning to – history repeats itself.

“I think a lot about the past and how it applies to the present,” Pendergast explains, pointing to one of his favourite observations from Henry David Thoreau: Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. “I am always thinking about the cycles of life, and I think the songs on this record reflect that thinking.”

Those cycles come sharply into focus on “The Maiden Voyage,” a sparse folk song about uncertainty, upheaval, and beginning again. Its title refers to a ship’s first journey, an image Pendergast uses to capture the peculiar combination of hope and apprehension that accompanies setting out into the unknown.

The song itself arrived almost as instinctively as its subject suggests. Pendergast first picked out its melody in the back seat of a car during a road trip, then wrote the lyrics in a single sitting the following morning without entirely understanding what the song meant. He put it aside until roughly a year later, when turbulence in his own life and a massive hurricane striking the Maritimes suddenly brought its imagery back into focus. “It’s a song about cycles in life; the process of breaking and building,” he explains.

That sense of exposure also shaped the recording. Rather than surrounding “The Maiden Voyage” with a full arrangement, Pendergast and engineer/co-producer Mark Westberg recorded it solo and live off the floor, allowing the lyric and performance to carry the track without embellishment.

The approach reflects the wider philosophy behind Jack Pine. For the past several years, Pendergast has felt himself moving away from the frameworks of other songwriters and toward a musical language increasingly recognizable as his own. Eastern Canadian folk remains his home base, with the sea, natural world, and history providing recurring imagery through which he examines change, continuity, and lived experience.

Much of that identity was reinforced during the album’s unusually communal recording process. Pendergast and his fellow musicians moved into an old church for five days, living and recording together before spending their evenings around the fireplace playing cards, swapping stories, and joking late into the night.

Rather than treating tradition as something fixed, Jack Pine draws on the music Pendergast inherited while allowing personal experience to reshape it, continuing the same process of transmission and reinvention that has kept folk songs alive for generations.

Nova Scotia-based artist Jont shares “Feel So Much,” an intimate new single about recognizing emotional withdrawal in someone you love. Pairing reflective alternative songwriting with a surprisingly uplifting undercurrent, the track emerged at a fragile point in a relationship, when renewed closeness began giving way to familiar patterns of avoidance.

The song arrived shortly after Jont returned from a dream trip to New York with his then-partner. Their journey to that point had been anything but straightforward, but after finding their way back together, he felt ready to see where the relationship could lead. Soon after coming home, however, he sensed something beginning to shift.

Following a phone conversation, Jont closed his eyes and tried to feel into what his partner might be experiencing. Within five minutes, the initial lyrics to “Feel So Much” appeared without an instrument in sight. Only afterwards did he pick up his guitar, with the music dropping almost fully formed around the words.

“I wrote the song as a way of trying to help my partner see what was going on,” Jont explains. “I sent it to her as a voice note, with guitar and vocals, 30 minutes after we had talked and she was kind of shocked. The picture I’d drawn of her was pretty bang on. It was drawn in love. I was completely committed to our relationship.”

Although the relationship ultimately ended, “Feel So Much” avoids turning that outcome into an accusation. For Jont, the song instead considers how trauma can affect our ability to remain present with difficult feelings, and how numbing out can become an instinctive form of self-protection.

Once in the studio, Jont added a bridge written after the breakup. Imagining his former partner eventually hearing the finished song, he wanted to offer consolation rather than bitterness, an instinct that also pulled the music away from becoming overly downbeat.

“I find it hard to write downbeat songs,” he says. “My natural urge is always resurgence. I can’t stay down for long. Here I wanted to sing to my ex after our break up, and despite how things ended, I wanted to offer her some consolation.”

“The song came through so naturally and so quickly, it was like a sketch on an envelope inspired by how I knew a certain person,” Jont continues. “There’s an intriguing jauntiness to the song itself that kind of says ‘fuck it,’ surrenders to what is, accepts its fate.”

What began as a song written for one person ultimately captures something broader about accepting what cannot be changed. Things did not unfold as Jont hoped, but time brought its own resolution – he and his former partner are now friends.

What happens when a love of psychedelic rock, a soft spot for 1980s arena anthems, and a desire to make sense of family history all find their way onto the same record? For Los Angeles-based musician Shane Patrick Cronin, the answer is Can’t You Feel It?, the debut album released October 30 under his artist project, Whisker.

A singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, Cronin has built the project around a combination of dreamy psychedelic sounds, folk-influenced storytelling, and classic rock energy. Inspired by artists including Tame Impala, Djo, and Phoebe Bridgers, Whisker offers a sound that can be introspective one moment and ready for a loud car stereo the next.

That contrast is part of what makes Can’t You Feel It? an introduction to an artist with more than one musical side.

Cronin grew up in a musical household as the son of REO Speedwagon frontman Kevin Cronin. Yet his own route into music began with an unexpected detour. He and his twin brother Josh were basketball standouts at Westlake High School until their older sister Holly convinced them to join the school choir.

Shane discovered his voice through singing and eventually studied at USC’s Pop Music program, graduating as a vocal major. During high school, he and Josh had already started a band, Sir, Please, with friends Marshall Via, Michael Leese, and David Kohn.

The group spent years writing, recording, and touring. Its song “Dance With Me” has accumulated more than 11 million streams, and the band opened REO Speedwagon’s 2021 West Coast Tour.

After the members began pursuing separate creative paths, Cronin shifted his focus to Whisker, a project that gave him greater freedom to shape the music himself.

That freedom is evident in the album’s emotional center. Several songs explore the relationships that have shaped Cronin’s life, including his connection with his father and his twin brother.

“Bus Stop” looks back at his childhood and the complicated experience of having a father whose career kept him on the road for much of the year. The song revisits a specific memory from when Cronin was 11, when he experienced an anxiety attack while boarding a bus with his father.

His father comforted him, offering a moment of closeness that Cronin now understands differently as an adult.

“Growing up as the son of a touring musician, my dad was absent for 8 months out of the year. The financial security he provided came with a lack of closeness, which was difficult to deal with,” he explains.

Rather than reducing that relationship to a simple story of absence, the song explores the complicated coexistence of distance and love.

“Kin,” meanwhile, examines the changing dynamic between Cronin and his twin brother. The two had always been close, but their different preferences for adult life began to pull them in separate directions. Shane wanted to be in the fast-paced environment of Los Angeles, while Josh preferred a slower, quieter lifestyle.

Writing the song helped Shane confront the distance that had developed between them and find a way toward reconnecting.

But Can’t You Feel It? isn’t all serious reflection. Cronin also makes room for a musical guilty pleasure with “Marry Into Money,” an energetic, 1980s-inspired rock track that celebrates his affection for the era’s biggest sounds.

“‘Marry Into Money’ was my way of scratching my 80’s rock itch. My guilty pleasures are Foreigner, Journey, Def Leppard, among other epic ‘80s bands,” he says.

The track delivers a more exuberant side of Whisker, with an approach that contrasts with the album’s quieter moments. It also makes clear that Cronin’s interest in nostalgia extends beyond memories of childhood. He is equally interested in the sounds and styles that have shaped his musical tastes.

Another highlight, “If I Run,” has an unusually long history. Cronin wrote the song nine years ago but wasn’t satisfied with an earlier recording made with his former band. Returning to it for the album allowed him to strip the arrangement back and build it around piano, guitar, and drums.

The result reflects the album’s broader approach: revisiting the past, keeping what still feels meaningful, and making room for a different perspective.

With Can’t You Feel It?, Whisker brings together personal storytelling and a wide-ranging musical sensibility. Cronin’s background has given him plenty of material to draw from, but the album is less about his family name than about the perspective he has developed through his own experiences.

The debut captures an artist learning to navigate adulthood, reconsider relationships, and find his place in music, all while maintaining room for a little rock-and-roll excess.

For Whisker, growing up doesn’t mean abandoning the past. Sometimes it means turning it into a song.

Experimental duo Allegories release their long-awaited new album, By Accident, On Purpose, alongside the focus track “Glorious Vanity.” Moving restlessly through electronic, indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze, and more abstract terrain, the record is the result of a creative experiment that began with a seemingly simple set of rules: write every song on ukulele, make the ukulele disappear, and rebuild what remained using electronic instrumentation.

In theory, the restrictions were meant to simplify Adam Bentley and Jordan Mitchell’s process. Instead, they opened up an almost overwhelming number of possibilities, sending the duo down a winding creative road that began in 2021 and only reached its conclusion in the summer of 2026.

“In theory, it seemed like a way to simplify our process,” the duo shares. “In reality, it opened up a million possibilities and often made the original song almost irrelevant.”

That tension between limitation and possibility became the engine behind the album. Allegories have long used self-imposed parameters to disrupt familiar habits and force themselves toward ideas they might otherwise overlook. Here, Jordan gradually buried the original ukulele compositions beneath eclectic new arrangements before Adam wrote additional vocals and melodies overtop, with the competing versions ultimately fused together.

Some of those original songs remain clearly present. Others barely survived. Focus track “Glorious Vanity” is the most extreme example: only its title remains from the initial composition, as the duo followed the song into the most ethereal space found anywhere on By Accident, On Purpose.

Dreamy and immersive, “Glorious Vanity” captures the willingness to abandon a predetermined destination that came to define the record. Rather than protecting the original idea, Allegories allowed instinct and experimentation to dictate what the song needed to become, creating a particularly weightless entry point into an album shaped by discovery.

The process also produced an unexpected sonic turn. Despite initially planning to rebuild the songs electronically, increasingly organic elements found their way back into the music. Guitars, largely absent from 2022’s Endless, returned alongside live drums and bass. Shoegaze textures surfaced, while traces of Jordan and Adam’s decade spent together in indie rock band The Rest began bleeding through the electronic experimentation.

The resulting record sits somewhere between those histories. Indie-electronic production collides with dream pop atmosphere, indie rock instrumentation, fractured arrangements, and flashes of pop immediacy. Familiar structures appear before veering somewhere less predictable, allowing the duo’s electronic and rock instincts to coexist without either becoming the dominant language.

What initially made By Accident, On Purpose frustrating ultimately became its guiding principle. The rules designed to narrow the duo’s options instead forced them into unfamiliar territory, where accidents could become creative decisions and unexpected ideas could reshape the direction of the record.

The title consequently feels less like a contradiction than an explanation of how Allegories work. There is intention behind the parameters, but no guarantee of where they will lead. After five years of following those possibilities, By Accident, On Purpose finds its identity somewhere between control and surrender.