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.

Total Fucking Darkness return with “This Is The Last Time,” a skyscraping piece of electronic pop schmaltz about letting go, following your dreams, and setting your heart on fire. Epic and yearning in equal measure, the track finds Torquil Campbell, Stephen Ramsay, and Tom McFall shamelessly reaching toward pop transcendence while remaining acutely aware of how ridiculous that pursuit can be. It’s taken from Total Fucking Darkness’ upcoming new album, set for release in 2027.

When asked what inspired it, Ramsay offers a characteristically economical answer: “New Order.”

“This Is The Last Time” arrived with similarly little ceremony. Ramsay had barely made it through the instrumental once before Campbell had the lyrics ready. “It may as well be called ‘Real Time’ because Torq wrote this in real time,” Ramsay explains. “By the time I played him the instrumental once, he had written the lyrics.”

For all the band’s instinctive irreverence, the song reaches for something sincere beneath the electronic grandeur. “This Is The Last Time” is about the point where letting go becomes forward motion: following whatever dream remains, committing to it completely, and accepting that sometimes the only sensible response to uncertainty is to set your heart on fire and see what survives.

Sonically, the track looks backward to move forward. Total Fucking Darkness have always harboured an unresolved obsession with late-’80s and early-’90s electronic music, and “This Is The Last Time” pushes that fixation toward its biggest pop instincts. There are no software shortcuts hiding beneath the surface either. “No plug-ins, anywhere. This track is all analog, baby.” The result is unapologetically oversized electronic pop: yearning, melodic, synthetic, and built with one eye permanently fixed on an imagined past.

“Every band says their latest music is the best thing they’ve ever done,” Ramsay says. “It’s obviously cliché at this point and therefore categorically untrue in almost all cases, but I’m telling you, this is the best song we’ve written.”

Had they released it in 1991, he argues, somebody would currently be sitting on a yacht in the Mediterranean rather than answering interview questions from a Starbucks bathroom. History has denied them that opportunity. “This Is The Last Time” will have to do.

Toronto yacht-rock influenced quartet The Boathouse share “Like a Lover,” a bombastic new single that pairs the larger-than-life sound of ‘80s AOR and synth-rock with an unexpectedly sincere declaration of romantic commitment. Built around towering guitars, gleaming synthesizers, huge drums and a detour into Prince-inspired funk, the track emerged from a period of housing uncertainty that put a relationship under pressure and ultimately reinforced the feeling that some challenges are easier to face when someone has your back.

The song was written soon after bassist and vocalist Tristan Armstrong and his partner moved into an apartment in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. After navigating the city’s fiercely competitive rental market, they had finally found a place they were excited to call home. Just months later, however, their landlord informed them that the property needed to be sold following poor business decisions, abruptly throwing their future into uncertainty.

“This thrust us into a period of disappointment, uncertainty and anxiety,” Tristan explains. “These times can greatly test a relationship, and have a tendency to either strengthen or splinter.”

Rather than allowing that anxiety to make its way into the song as cynicism, “Like a Lover” goes emphatically in the opposite direction. Inspired in part by listening to The Darkness and Chromeo, Tristan became interested in writing something so unabashedly sincere that its romanticism might almost be mistaken for a joke. Beneath the outsized performances and playful posturing of both influences, he heard a genuine sweetness that gave him permission to embrace the same idea without reservation.

The song sets an anthemic ‘80s rock foundation against a funky, Prince-esque bridge and ending section, creating a shift the band describes as simultaneously “jarring and delightful.” Rather than smoothing out those contrasts, The Boathouse uses them to showcase the individual personalities within the quartet, with featured moments and solo sections allowing each musician space to step forward.

While some ideas can spend months or years waiting to become fully formed tracks, Tristan wrote the verses and chorus of “Like a Lover” in a flash before sending the demo to guitarist Ryan Farley. Ryan responded with the muscular bridge riff that gives the song what the band affectionately describes as an “LA slickness,” while Josh Trager’s commanding drum parts and Vincent Spilchuk’s keyboards pushed the arrangement further toward the virtuosity and sheen of classic session-player rock.

That aesthetic was amplified in the mix by Devon Lougheed, who gave “Like a Lover” the deep, bombastic character of an era when high-gain guitars and cutting-edge synthesizers could occupy equal space on rock radio. The enormous drum sound completes the picture, giving the track enough muscle to match its gleaming surfaces and unabashed romanticism.

“Like a Lover” will also appear on The Boathouse’s forthcoming debut full-length album, due later this year. Across the project, the quartet filters the smooth sounds of ‘70s and ‘80s rock through a more contemporary lyrical lens, returning repeatedly to what they describe as three enduring subjects: “Love, loneliness, dystopian futures. We feel these are the core themes of our time, and the times that preceded.”

Victoria, BC outfit The Bankes Brothers share “Georgia Peaches,” a catchy, easygoing indie rock track that finds the band discovering confidence in simplicity. Arriving alongside the announcement of their debut full-length album, For the sake of my love I hope I make it, out February 10, 2027 via Blue Heron Music, the single captures the spirit of the forthcoming record through its balance of intimacy, experimentation, and instinctive songwriting.

One of the earliest songs recorded with acclaimed producer Gus van Go (The Beaches, Metric, Arkells) at Toronto’s Boiler Room, “Georgia Peaches” became an early benchmark for how the band would approach the rest of the album. Instead of adding layers simply because they could, The Bankes Brothers adopted a guiding philosophy of “less is more” and, more importantly, “serve the song.”

“This one was one of the earlier recordings we did with Gus and it kind of set the tone for how we were approaching all the songs going forward,” explains Nelson Bankes. “I can’t recall one particular moment when it felt like it all came together, I just remember all of us being so happy with it when we left the studio.”

That understated approach extends to the song’s meaning. Nelson describes “Georgia Peaches” as something of an ode to the “Walter Mitty’s of the world,” but deliberately leaves the rest open to interpretation. Rather than prescribing a particular emotion or message, The Bankes Brothers see the song as something that stops belonging exclusively to them once it reaches listeners.

“I’m a fan of the philosophy that the music is ours when we write and record, but once it’s released it’s for you to listen to and relate with however you please,” Nelson says. “If it speaks to you in any way whatsoever, we’ve done our job as musicians.”

The recording itself unfolded with the same sense of ease. The band had always felt the demo carried a slightly lo-fi quality, so they deliberately approached the guitars and drums with that atmosphere in mind. During the sessions, they began joking that “Georgia Peaches” sounded like the perfect song for driving in the rain. As luck would have it, it was the middle of Toronto’s monsoon season.

Taking advantage of the weather, Gus van Go placed a microphone in the doorway leading to the studio’s back alley and captured the falling rain. The recording became the song’s intro, immediately placing the listener inside the hazy, unhurried atmosphere the band had been chasing.

“Georgia Peaches” also became one of those rare recordings where nothing seemed to fight back. From writing through the final studio decisions, the song arrived without the second-guessing and revisions that can accompany even the most straightforward tracks.

“This one flowed very nicely both in writing and recording,” Nelson recalls. “It felt like every decision was the right one, from start to finish. We walked out of the studio not needing any touch ups on anything, and that never happens. Ha!”

The solo project of NYC artist Curran Reynolds, Body Stuff summons a strange vision of cathartic rock music that indeed evokes the passion of The Boss, then bolsters it with metallic power and cloaks it in a dreamlike haze. At times, yearning, at times, euphoric, Body Stuff seems to encompass the extremes of NYC, from the sewer to the skyscraper. Reynolds opts to call it, simply, “hard rock.”

Sophomore album, Body Stuff 5, coming October 16, 2026, brings the project to new depths and heights. Through eight anthemic songs, humming with longing and triumph, Body Stuff 5 captivates. Big, slamming drum beats, seemingly echoing the boomboxes of NYC summers past, are peppered with storms of double-bass. Guitars, performed by Reynolds’ friend Andee Blacksugar of Blondie, ravage and glisten, transmitting from a place where hair metal and postpunk converge. Organ, trumpets, and church bells make fleeting appearances.

Tying everything together is Reynolds’ voice, an earnest bellow that has earned comparisons to Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman as well as the aforementioned Springsteen. Recent live videos show Reynolds prowling the stage, headbanging, delivering his words with full-body conviction. His autobiographical lyrics explore the pain of existence, referencing haunting memories culled from more than a quarter-century of life in NYC, but often land in a place of gratitude. The sincere and uplifting slant of Reynolds’ lyrics is one of the many factors separating Body Stuff from the pack. “I want to give ’til nothing’s left, complete surrender, nothing less,” he insists on the album’s rousing opener, “Eternal Hurricane.” “Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice for love,” he pleads at the end of the album’s closer, “Sacrifice,” out today with video. Reynolds further explains: “I made this music video one morning after watching Jean Cocteau’s film, Blood of a Poet. I loved the scene in that film where the artist is peeping in keyholes in the hotel and I woke up wanting to replicate that. As fate would have it, my building here in Brooklyn was built in the

1850s and one of the doors in my apartment has the most perfect, iconic keyhole.”

A writer, visual artist, and musician since childhood, Reynolds has been creating since the 1980s. Body Stuff 5, engineered and mixed by longtime collaborator Ryan Jones and mastered by the iconic Ted Jensen (The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Metallica), is his greatest work to date.

“My first concert was Tina Turner,” he reminisces. “I was 10 years old. That was a crucial experience. The look, the sound, the performance.”

Reynolds left home for NYC at age 17. In his early days in the city, he chased cheap rents across the East Village, Lower East Side, and Williamsburg, and entrenched himself in music, art, and nightlife. With no money and no connections, he clawed his way up, getting his record reviews published in the nascent Vice Magazine and landing a dream job at Earache Records where he served as the publicist for death metal legends Morbid Angel and Deicide. He went on to assist on photo shoots with some of the world’s biggest fashion photographers, then worked in the sculpture studio of one of his favorite artists, Matthew Barney. He founded Precious Metal, a weekly series of live music that earned the title of “Best Metal Party” in The Village Voice. He joined one of his favorite bands, cult hero Steve Austin’s Today Is The Day, and toured the world.

It was against this backdrop that Body Stuff first emerged. After more than a decade spent grinding away on various creative fronts in NYC, the idea to recreate himself as a solo artist took shape in Reynolds’ mind. The first Body Stuff EP, recorded in bits and pieces by Reynolds and Jones between 2011 and 2012, is a thing of raw, awkward beauty. Minimalistic, metallic rock songs, propelled by a pounding drum machine, are crowned by ravishing hooks and ghostly interludes. Reynolds’ lyrics process his years in NYC – the isolation, the dangers of the street, the violent deaths of friends – and yet amidst these dark tales arise overwhelmingly optimistic tones. “Man on the street, mortal enemy,” he murmurs in the opening lines of the EP’s first track, setting a scene of conflict, before flipping the script and turning the song into a call for peace: “I’m on your side.”

“Making music that was entirely my own, for the very first time, it’s like I was reconnecting with the 10-year-old me and working from that pure, instinctual, ecstatic place,” he explains. “I was expressing myself in a way where I was completely vulnerable and I found power in that.”

The Body Stuff sound and vision grew steadily more elaborate from there, whilst holding true to the spirit of the early material. By the time the debut full-length, Body Stuff 4, dropped in 2023, Reynolds was able to get “I Think We’re Alone Now” pop star Tiffany to contribute guest vocals to one song and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart to remix a track. He meanwhile developed Body Stuff into a full-fledged live act, appearing on bills around NYC with the likes of Martin Rev, Godflesh, and Uniform.

Now, with sophomore album Body Stuff 5 coming October 16, 2026 via The Chain (the multifaceted company co-founded by Reynolds and Justin Pearson of The Locust, Deaf Club, and Three One G Records), Body Stuff is Reynolds’ primary focus. It is a project originating deep within the heart of its creator and occupying its own unique space. Yet, Reynolds’ hope is to unite, not divide: “My intention is to continue making the most authentic art I can. This is how we make the world a better place.”

Lebanese-Canadian artist Raphaela shares “Take It Back,” a nostalgic, uplifting pop single caught between memory and uncertainty. Vivid and cinematic, the track looks back at a love that once felt effortless while confronting how different it has become.

The idea took shape during a writing session in Nashville with Jordan Lake. When asked what she wanted to write about that day, Raphaela noticed an old Dolly Parton vinyl titled I Wish I Felt This Way at Home. Surrounded by the excitement and inspiration of Nashville, the phrase made her consider what happens when a person who once felt like home suddenly doesn’t anymore.

The title initially suggests wanting a relationship back, but its meaning gradually shifts. “Taking it back” becomes less about reversing an ending than revisiting an earlier time when everything was new and full of possibility. “There’s a sadness in knowing you may need to let something go while still longing for the version of it that once felt like home,” Raphaela explains.

That conflict crystallizes in the lyric, “Would it be all for nothing if I leave you now?” It’s a question Raphaela sees extending beyond romance to friendships, careers, or anything into which we have poured significant parts of ourselves.

“When we’ve invested so much of ourselves into something, even when we know in our gut that it’s time to leave, we can spend so much time wondering whether walking away somehow erases everything that came before it,” she says. “I think the song lives in that tension – knowing something can have been meaningful, beautiful and real, even if it isn’t meant to last forever.”

Months after the initial Nashville session, Josh Bogert joined Raphaela to reshape and produce the track, translating that push and pull into cinematic pop. Its structure mirrors the progression: verse one lives in memory, verse two introduces doubt, and the chorus is where the two collide.

“Take It Back” marks the first chapter in a larger body of work that moves through memory, doubt, grief, longing, relapse, and eventually hope. Here, Raphaela establishes the story at its point of uncertainty, before the songs that follow venture deeper into its emotional fallout.

Continuing to push beyond the sound established on their breakout debut EP, Toronto indie quintet Next Week’s Washing shares “Clear Eyes,” a massive, dreamy, and cinematic new single that brings alternative rock energy together with densely layered shoegaze. Taken from the band’s forthcoming sophomore EP, Spiral, set for release on November 13th, the track represents their most expansive recording yet, combining walls of textured instrumentation with upfront vocals and a growing confidence in the sound they can distinctly call their own.

“Clear Eyes” was the first song Next Week’s Washing wrote after completing their debut EP. Rather than starting over, the band approached the track as an opportunity to take the foundations they had already established and push them somewhere bigger.

“We wanted to take the sound we had begun to develop with the first six songs and push it forward,” the band explains. “We took a lot more time building layers into the recording, and the result is our biggest (sonically) sounding song yet.”

That progression can be heard throughout the track. While the instrumentation leans heavily into the band’s shoegaze influences, Next Week’s Washing deliberately pushed the vocals forward in the mix, allowing the songwriting to remain present within the song’s towering layers of guitars. The result lands somewhere between the immersive atmosphere of shoegaze and the immediacy of alternative and indie rock, bringing the different sides of the band’s identity into sharper focus.

For Next Week’s Washing, that convergence of influences is precisely what makes “Clear Eyes” significant. Rather than sounding indebted to any single reference point, the band sees the track as one of the clearest representations yet of what their own sound can become.

“It’s probably the truest blend of all our influences that we’ve ever written,” they share. “It feels like something only Next Week’s Washing could’ve written, and we’re proud of that.”

The song’s title arrived only after the music and lyrics were already complete. Fans of the television series Friday Night Lights, the band found themselves returning to Coach Taylor’s recurring mantra, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” The phrase unexpectedly aligned with the meaning they had already discovered within the song, giving the track its name and adding another layer to its perspective.

“Clear Eyes” describes how it feels to move through life when you’re young and everything is in flux. Sometimes you thrive on the uncertainty and at other times you really want straight answers or a direct path forward. You can get knocked around quite a bit, even when you try to plan ahead or think things through. Ultimately the song is a call to trust your instincts and enjoy the ride – we’re all in it together.

One of the recording’s defining moments emerged just as spontaneously. The song’s breakdown was initially conceived as entirely instrumental, but after hearing the completed arrangement in the studio, the band felt something was missing. They wrote a short poem to test over the section, unsure whether the words would work rhythmically against the music. When Miles stepped up to record it, the experiment immediately clicked.

That instinctive moment reflects the larger evolution behind “Clear Eyes.” As Next Week’s Washing progress into the era of their second EP, the band are becoming increasingly comfortable expanding their arrangements without sacrificing the directness at the heart of their songwriting. The scale may be growing, but their perspective remains grounded in documenting the world as they experience it.

“When we’re writing a song, we like to try and embody the perspective that our generation has on the world,” the band explains. “We feel like it’s part of our duty as we’re coming up with the next generation of great music.”