Some albums look backward to understand the present. On Can’t You Feel It?, the debut album from Los Angeles-based artist Whisker, memories of childhood, family relationships, and earlier versions of the self become the foundation for a sound that feels both nostalgic and forward-looking.

Released October 30, the album is the latest project from Shane Patrick Cronin, a singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose music draws from psychedelic rock, folk, and classic rock and roll. Influences such as Tame Impala, Djo, and Phoebe Bridgers help frame the project’s musical landscape, but Whisker’s identity emerges through the contrast between its expansive arrangements and the intimate stories at their center.

Across the record, Cronin moves between dreamy textures and straightforward rock energy. Songs can feel lush and layered without losing their emotional focus, while the album’s more energetic moments introduce a playful streak that keeps the project from becoming weighed down by reflection.

That balance is particularly clear in the contrast between “Bus Stop” and “Marry Into Money.”

On “Bus Stop,” Cronin revisits his childhood as the son of REO Speedwagon frontman Kevin Cronin. Growing up with a father who spent much of the year touring meant navigating the difference between knowing he was loved and missing the everyday closeness of having him around.

The song centers on a childhood memory involving an anxiety attack at a bus stop, when his father offered comfort. Looking back as an adult, Cronin is able to understand the moment in a way that his younger self could not.

It is an example of how Can’t You Feel It? uses songwriting to reconsider personal history rather than simply document it. The past remains complicated, but time offers another way to understand it.

The album opener, “Kin,” approaches a similar subject through Cronin’s relationship with his twin brother, Josh. Having grown up closely connected, the brothers began to drift apart as their adult lives took different directions. Cronin gravitated toward the pace of Los Angeles, while Josh preferred a quieter life closer to home.

Writing the song helped Cronin confront the distance between them and consider how their relationship might change without disappearing.

That reflective sensibility sits alongside a very different kind of nostalgia on “Marry Into Money.” Built around the dramatic energy of 1980s rock, the song reflects Cronin’s affection for Foreigner, Journey, Def Leppard, and the larger-than-life sound of the era.

“‘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 is an unapologetically energetic moment on an album that frequently favors introspection. Rather than treating these different approaches as contradictory, Whisker allows them to coexist, reflecting an artist whose musical tastes extend beyond a single genre or mood.

The same sense of personal history shapes “If I Run,” a song Cronin first wrote nine years ago. An earlier recording failed to capture what he wanted from the material, leading him to revisit it for his debut album. This time, he built the arrangement around piano, with guitar and drums adding atmosphere and weight without overwhelming the song.

The process gave him a chance to reconnect with the original idea and approach it with a different understanding of himself.

Cronin’s path to Whisker began long before the project took shape. As the son of a touring musician, he grew up around music but initially pursued basketball alongside his twin brother. An invitation from their older sister to join their high school choir eventually helped him discover his voice and set him on a path toward studying vocal performance at USC.

He later formed Sir, Please with his brother and friends, spending years writing, recording, and touring. The band’s “Dance With Me” has accumulated more than 11 million streams, and its run opening for REO Speedwagon in 2021 added another chapter to a musical journey that began during high school.

Whisker gives Cronin the opportunity to bring those experiences together on his own terms. With two EPs preceding the debut, the project has already begun to establish a sound built around psychedelic production, classic rock influences, and emotionally direct songwriting.

On Can’t You Feel It?, nostalgia is not simply an aesthetic. It is a way of revisiting old relationships, reconsidering difficult memories, and recognizing how much can change without losing what matters. The album’s most compelling moments emerge from that tension, pairing the expansive sound of psychedelic rock with stories that remain distinctly personal.

Can’t You Feel It? is out now.

Guitarist, singer, and a founding member of New York City’s Spin Doctors, Eric Schenkman returns with “Avocado Eldorado,” a driving rock ’n’ roll track inspired by his grandfather’s Cadillac.

In “Avocado Eldorado,” Schenkman looks back at his grandfather’s green Cadillac Eldorado, presently rusting away in an old Vermont barn. The relic – a wide-ass, loud, stately car – represents freedom and the romance of the open road. For Schenkman in particular, it also honours the “old men” who played pivotal roles in his life.

The song’s title has its own history. In 1995, Schenkman traveled from San Francisco to legendary guitarist David Lindley’s Reseda, CA home with drummer Wally Ingram. When they arrived, Schenkman spotted Lindley’s big blue 1970s Cadillac Eldorado sitting in the driveway.

“My grandfather has the same car, only it’s an avocado Eldorado,” Schenkman remembers telling him. Lindley’s response was immediate: “That’s a song you should write.”

“It only took 30 years!” Schenkman says.

That long pause is fitting for a song Schenkman describes as deeply autobiographical. It brings so many things back to life: his grandfather, his childhood, and the Cadillac itself with its bench seats big enough to sleep on, the chrome grills reflecting the road and the avocado paint giving it all of its funky glory.

I see the chrome grill and the avocado paint

Is it runnin’? It probably ain’t

The track also carries Schenkman’s preference for feel and spontaneity into the studio. Produced by Schenkman and Aaron Goldstein, “Avocado Eldorado” was recorded with “no click track. As unprecious as possible. Immediate rock ’n’ roll, like my experience.”

The recording features Schenkman on vocals and guitar, the dynamic rhythm section of Al Cross on drums and Stan Miczek on bass, with Carleigh Aikens on backup vocals. It was mixed and recorded by Goldstein and Kristian Montano, who mastered the track.

“Avocado Eldorado” was nearly complete, but it needed a bridge, so when Schenkman brought it to longtime friend and collaborator Jono Manson, during a writing and recording session in Santa Fe, Manson supplied the missing lyrics, completing a song whose origins stretched back decades.

Ahead of their upcoming fourth studio album’s 2027 arrival, New York’s Earthquake Lights share “Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be,” a confident, brooding new single that turns psychedelic alt-rock swagger into a character study of arrogance, narcissism and questionable wisdom. Inspired in part by the unruly spirit of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the track inhabits the mind of a self-described artist whose certainty in his own worldview is as compelling as it is misguided.

The song began with a handful of chords the band initially considered disposable. Once they played them together, however, the feeling proved too good to abandon. The confidence of the emerging arrangement soon suggested a personality of its own, providing the foundation for vocalist/pianist Myles Rodenhouse and collaborator Will Cavanaugh to develop the character at the centre of the song.

The result is a narrator who is arrogant, self-important, and convinced he has life figured out. Yet rather than reducing him to a caricature, “Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be” leaves a small but uncomfortable possibility hanging in the air: somewhere beneath all that narcissistic bluster, he might actually have a point. The question is whether he’s someone whose advice you would ever want to take.

The song’s unusual title emerged from one of its defining lyrics, a line that seemed to capture the character so completely that it ultimately sparked the broader lyrical concept. That sense of self-assurance permeates the arrangement as well, allowing the personality of the narrator and the music surrounding him to become increasingly difficult to separate.

A driving force behind that atmosphere is guitarist Cameron Underhill’s spacious, deliberate guitar work. Reverb-drenched chords stretch across the verses without crowding them, leaving deliberate pockets of space for the drums, bass, and vocal. The result is open yet imposing, giving the song a psychedelic haze without sacrificing the muscular momentum of its alternative-rock foundation.

That looseness also carried into the recording itself. Rather than constructing the performance piece by piece, Earthquake Lights recorded the core of “Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be” together at Douglass Recording in Brooklyn with very little comping or editing. Guitarist Justin Garcia improvised the song’s solo on the day, preserving the session’s spontaneity, while vocals, Rhodes and strings orchestrated by Mitchell McCarthy were added later.

The track was co-produced alongside Phil Joly, formerly Chief Engineer at Electric Lady Studios, continuing the creative partnership introduced on the band’s previous single. Its sweeping strings were recorded at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios as part of a single-day orchestral session for much of the forthcoming album, with additional passages later punched in with an orchestra in Brooklyn.

“Mr. Always-What-He-Had-To-Be” arrives as the second single from Earthquake Lights’ upcoming fourth full-length album, due in early 2027. Where previous single “Too Late” explored longing and regret through soulful, neo-classical songwriting, the new release reveals a decidedly darker and more confrontational side of the record, driven by character, swagger and the uneasy line between confidence and delusion.

Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Teagan Johnston unveils her sophomore album, Big Time, a candid exploration of ambition, identity, family, heartbreak and the often absurd pursuit of success. Written and recorded over two years between Taurus Recording in Toronto and Sonic Ranch in Texas, the record pushes further into alt-country territory while retaining Teagan’s distinctive collision of singer-songwriter folk, emo and indie/alternative rock. Previously released singles have been met with critical acclaim from CBC’s Q, Exclaim! and Sirius XM.

Big Time emerged during a period when Teagan deliberately stepped back from her music career and began reflecting on a decade spent struggling to “hit the big time.” Rather than arriving at a simple answer, the album questions what that idea actually means, moving between darker experiences of familial trauma and heartbreak, and moments of brevity, humour and recognition of life’s inherent absurdity.

Those reflections are deeply intertwined with Teagan’s understanding of home. After severing ties with several family members while confronting childhood trauma, she began reconsidering the places, relationships and ambitions she had previously looked toward for a sense of belonging.

The title track was the first song Teagan wrote for the record, arriving before she was even certain the music would become something she wanted to release. Its lyric, “We got on like a house on fire,” unexpectedly connected the song to an image sent to her that same night by photographer Christopher Jerome: his photograph “House Fire.”

The image depicts a burning “Vancouver Special” surrounded by an otherwise dark, quiet neighbourhood. Having spent much of her childhood in Victoria, BC, Teagan immediately connected its familiar architecture to her own childhood home and experiences. The contrast between a seemingly ordinary suburban setting and the urgency of a house engulfed in flames mirrored the disconnect between how a family can appear from the outside and what may be unfolding within it. The photograph ultimately became the album cover.

That imagery carries into the “Big Time” music video, co-directed by Teagan and filmmaker Ryan Glover, whose previous collaborations include the Canadian horror film The Strings. Returning to the DIY approach that has long defined their work together, the pair used a projector, Hi8 camera, and Ryan’s family home in Burlington, ON, filming until four in the morning to create a dreamlike exploration of home, identity and memory.

“I wanted to incorporate the album and song’s imagery of a burning home but present it in a way that could feel joyful, explorative and almost childlike,” Teagan explains. “I think when I was writing Big Time, the question of home and identity were really at the forefront of my mind.”

For Teagan, that search for home also became inseparable from her ideas about success. Having grown up moving frequently, she spent much of her twenties consciously or subconsciously looking for belonging in other people and in her career, hoping something “big” might fill the space left behind. Ultimately, both the song and album turn that pursuit inward, questioning whether the “Big Time” is something external to reach at all.

Musically, that journey took shape through two years of writing, recording, and testing the songs in front of live audiences. Sessions stretched from Taurus Recording – whose history includes July Talk, Tokyo Police Club and The Sheepdogs – to Sonic Ranch, the Texas studio associated with artists including Waxahatchee, Fiona Apple and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Following “Fleury Street” and “Love on the Way Down,” Québec-based singer-songwriter Sébastien De Francesco shares “Leaving Now,” an intimate and bittersweet folk-rock single that imagines the final moments between two close friends from the perspective of the person preparing to leave. Moving between companionship, reassurance and acceptance, the song finds tenderness within loss while holding onto the belief that love and connection continue after someone is gone.

Inspired by the final afternoon Sébastien spent with a close friend who was dying of cancer, “Leaving Now” gradually became an imagined conversation between the two. Some lines are voiced from his friend’s perspective, asking for companionship as his memory and strength begin to fade, while others capture Sébastien’s instinct to comfort and protect him.

“The shifting point of view makes the song feel like an intimate conversation between two friends rather than simply a song about grief,” Sébastien shares.

The song’s title arrives only at its conclusion. Sébastien spent nearly an entire day working on the ending, knowing the conversation needed to reach its final goodbye without becoming overly dramatic. Eventually, the words “But I’m leaving now” emerged, as though his friend were gently acknowledging that it was time to go.

“‘Leaving Now’ expresses the immediacy of that goodbye, but the song also suggests that love and connection remain after someone leaves,” Sébastien explains.

Working once again alongside producer and multi-instrumentalist Lauren Bélec, Sébastien shaped the arrangement to mirror that emotional journey. The track begins restrained and conversational before gradually introducing additional layers and dynamics, allowing the music to expand alongside the weight of the exchange without overpowering its intimacy.

During the guitar solo preceding the song’s grand finale, Lili-Ann De Francesco contributes angelic background vocals that give the passage an almost otherworldly quality, as though the song is briefly moving beyond the physical world. From there, the “Can’t you see / Love is the key to it all” section opens into something wider and more uplifting before the arrangement falls away around the repeated words “Leaving now.”

That rise and release gives the song its emotional arc, moving from a private conversation into a larger expression of enduring love before returning to the simplicity of goodbye. Throughout, the vocal remains deliberately vulnerable and conversational, with Sébastien and Lauren favouring emotional honesty over an overly polished performance.