The Imaginary Band, the latest project from longtime Chilliwack, BC musician Andrew Christopher, expands from concept to fully realized collaboration on their self-titled debut album. Blending folk, rock, and Americana influences, the record captures the spontaneity and chemistry that happens when talented musicians gather in the same room and let creativity lead the way.
“I had written the songs and recorded some acoustic versions,” Andrew explains. “Then these incredible musicians came into my life and we just had to finish the songs with their added touches of brilliance.” What followed was a recording experience that felt both focused and free-flowing. Over two intense days in the studio, each musician stepped fully into their role while maintaining a supportive and lighthearted atmosphere. “We knew our assignments,” he recalls. “But of course, we kept it fun, lighthearted, and encouraging in a supportive atmosphere. People trying to out-solo each other in healthy competition was a highlight.”
At the heart of the album is its lead single, “If You Only Knew,” an unrelenting yet heartfelt folk-rock track that explores accountability and communication within personal relationships. The song balances its aggressive musical drive with a deeper emotional message: understanding often begins by turning inward.
“The title reflects the central idea of the song,” Andrew shares. “If you only knew what was really going on then you may be able to accept some responsibility and find ways that you can help the relationship.”
One memorable moment from the recording process involved a surprising shift in instrumentation. Originally, local guitar legend Trevor McDonald was set to record the track’s solo while contributing electric guitar across the record. Instead, he suggested experimenting with a violin solo. After some discussion, Christopher and keyboardist Devon Jared ultimately felt the song needed a guitar lead, leading Jared to step in and deliver the fiery solo that defines the track’s climax.
Warm but urgent, reflective yet propulsive, “If You Only Knew” captures the spirit that defines the entire album: real musicians playing real instruments, collaborating in real time. It’s a reminder that connection, honesty, and shared creativity can turn a collection of songs into something much bigger than any individual contributor.
With Pretty Demons (Remastered 2026), Andrew Spice revisits his acclaimed 2003 debut with renewed clarity and resonance. Rooted in piano-driven indie songwriting, the album captures the emotional turbulence of coming-of-age as a queer person in the late 1990s; a time when finding belonging often meant confronting hostility, isolation, and fear. Upon its original release, Pretty Demons received raves from publication after publication: “so sensitive it will break your heart” (The Varsity), “a genuine talent whose lyrics are carefully wrought poems” (NOW Magazine), “manages to put his finger on our collective hearts” (The Toronto Star). The album was also nominated for Outstanding Debut Recording at the OutMusic Awards. Now, more than two decades later, its themes of love, loss, identity, and survival remain strikingly relevant.
Following the success of Pretty Demons, Spice’s next step was unusual: He earned a Ph.D. and became a clinical psychologist. Then, while continuing to practice in psychology, he made a nearly-unprecedented return to the music industry after 22 years with the release of 2025’s With Animals. Produced by two-time JUNO Award nominee Matthew Barber, With Animals garnered worldwide press acclaim, international airplay, and tour dates at esteemed Canadian venues such as the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
The release of Pretty Demons (Remastered 2026) marks a thoughtful return to Spice’s roots after his sophomore album. Originally recorded under the guidance of producer and three-time JUNO Award-nominee Emm Gryner, Pretty Demons carries a deeply personal history between artist and collaborator. Spice first met Gryner at age 16 in 1998 while she was opening for Alanis Morissette in Winnipeg. After sending Gryner a cassette tape of demos, the two began a creative partnership that ultimately led to Spice signing with her label and moving to Toronto to begin recording Pretty Demons. “The transition from making tapes in my parents’ basement as a teenager to crafting a full album in the studio with Emm Gryner, who is one of my heroes, was a dream come true,” Spice recalls. “Remastering Pretty Demons in 2026 reaffirmed my pride in the record, feeling that it could resonate with listeners perhaps even more today than it did in 2003.”
Anchoring the album is its haunting lead single, “Unafraid,” a moody and emotionally charged track that reflects on the dangers and anxieties of growing up queer in rural Manitoba during the late 90s and early 2000s. While the song’s title gestures toward a desired state of freedom and safety, the tension within the music reveals how distant that feeling can sometimes seem. Even now, in 2026, across the world these dangers are still present and in some ways worse.
At the centre of both the album and “Unafraid” lies Spice’s unmistakable musical foundation: voice and piano. From that intimate core, Gryner layered subtle arrangements ranging from classically influenced strings to keyboards and programming. The 2026 remaster highlights these details with renewed depth, particularly the rich vocal harmonies Gryner crafted, drawing on her experience performing as a vocalist with David Bowie’s touring band.
Alt-rock outfit PICKLE JUICE share their brand new single “Halfway,” a raw and restless track that digs beneath the postcard-perfect image of ski town-living to expose the emotional turbulence that often hides beneath the surface. Driven by gritty guitars and a relentless pulse, “Halfway” captures the uneasy tension between daytime freedom and the darker cycles that can follow once the adrenaline fades. It’s the first single to drop from PICKLE JUICE’s upcoming sophomore EP, The Whiteroom, officially out June 12th, 2026.
“We’re a band that met while chasing winter, bonded over a shared love of snowboarding and the ski town lifestyle,” explains vocalist Tim van der Krogt. “On the surface, it’s this dream world, somewhere people spend thousands of dollars to visit for a week. It looks like pure freedom and happiness. But when you actually live there full time, especially within the seasonal and transient worker communities, depression and substance abuse rates can be really high.”
“People live these active, healthy lifestyles during the day, and then completely unravel at night,” Tim continues. “A lot of us are wired for that adrenaline rush, and we chase it however we can get it. This song is about getting stuck in that cycle, the highs and the lows, and feeling trapped in something that should feel like a dream.”
Written in fragments over time, “Halfway” began in humble surroundings before eventually evolving into one of the band’s most powerful recordings. “I wrote the melody and chord progression in our shitty band shed while [drummer] Pete [Lavery] was practicing a completely different song,” Tim recalls. “We fleshed it out a little that evening and then ended up putting it aside for almost a year. When we finally revisited it, we weren’t even in the same place geographically, so it came together in chunks. I never once thought it had single potential, but once we recorded it and heard it back properly, it was undeniable.”
Sonically, “Halfway” leans into the band’s alternative and garage rock roots, embracing the unpolished urgency that has become central to their sound. “This song has always carried a raw punch,” says guitarist Ben Matsis. “When it came time to record it, preserving that energy was essential. The final track doesn’t shy away from that intensity. We knew that pushing the song any further would risk making it feel forced rather than natural.”
1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically?
Hi, I’m Josh, lead guitarist and the guy behind most of the Pickle Juice music videos. After recording Halfway and hearing the first mixes, I think we all felt the same thing straight away. This was the single. Big chorus, fun bridge, and you could already see it getting a reaction live.
The song is about that space of being stuck in cycles. It’s that feeling of being aware that some of your habits or patterns aren’t great for you, but still getting pulled back into them anyway. It reflects ski town life in a way. On the surface everything looks like a dream, but underneath there can be a lot going on.
With our last release, Cheeky EP With The Boys, I wanted to explore a horror-style video, but none of the songs really called for it. Halfway felt different. The concept came naturally. I could clearly see a theme and direction for the video, which doesn’t always happen. So I jumped on it.2.What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
I wanted the video to feel like a ride. Something where you’re thinking, “where the hell is this going?” while still paying homage to B-horror and cinema.
B-horror is fun because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It can be unsettling for a moment, but you’re still enjoying it. That felt like a good match for the song.
The story came directly from the music. The “living dead” lyric before the second chorus, with that pause and whisper, created a really eerie and unsettling feeling. Then the bridge and guitar solo feel like drifting through time and space, which pushed the idea further.
The song itself is about being halfway. Not fully yourself and not fully whole. That feeling of being caught between two versions of yourself. A possession narrative felt like a natural extension of that.
Visually, I pulled inspiration from The Evil Dead for the chaotic energy of the story, The Witch for the intro tone, and Paranormal Activity for the in-house possession moments. The photo sequence was inspired by IT: Welcome to Derry, while the diary concept came from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The “all work and no play…” reference nods to The Shining, and the use of shifting aspect ratios was influenced by Westworld and Daredevil: Born Again to signal changes in perspective and reality.
It all comes together as a bit of a collage of influences in a chaotic and fun narrative.3.What was the process of making this video?
I wrote most of the video on a 7-hour drive from Rossland back to Revelstoke during a winter storm. My girlfriend was driving and I had the song on repeat, just getting ideas down as they came.
Once I got back and locked in the script, the next step was figuring out how to shoot it with little to no budget. For the band shots, I wanted something visually different. Our practice space is a tiny shed and we’ve already used it before, so instead I shot everything on a black backdrop. That gave me the ability to layer footage, adjust opacity, and build that ghost-like stacked effect in post.
We shot everything over a couple of weekends with a small DIY crew. Our rhythm guitarist Ben played the dark wizard. Conor, a mate from a café I used to work at, played the main character. My brother and his girlfriend let us use their place for most of the shoot.
We filmed the intro scenes last and brought in another friend, Kelsey, to help with production design, setting up candles and building out the sorcerer elements.
Technically, I’m really stoked on how the ghost POV in the first verse turned out. It was a bit of stitching clips together, but it came together pretty well.
Overall it was a fun and wholesome experience and stoked with how it all turned out.
Songs get written for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they’re just there to pass the time, sometimes they’re chasing a feeling and sometimes they’re built around nothing more than the urge to tell a story and see where it lands. “Wayward Sparrow,” the new track from Rich Clark’s project of the same name, is one of those songs that started with a simple idea and trusted itself enough not to overcomplicate things.
It began as an attempt to write something in that bluegrass tradition. Something certainly narrative driven, something that moves. The story itself is a familiar one: an innocent young girl who ends up heading down the wrong path without really meaning to. No big dramatic twist here, but very much a story that is something you have heard before. And this is what makes it work.
Musically, the single stands out as the most rhythmically driving track on the album. While the forthcoming record Devil By My Side as a whole leans more into sparse, atmospheric acoustic arrangements, “Wayward Sparrow” introduces a subtle forward momentum without compromising on its stripped down identity. Acoustic guitar remains the focus here, supported by understated vocal harmonies that drift in and out like texture. Small details that add depth without disrupting the minimal framework.
This atmosphere carries over into the recording process itself. Each song on Devil By My Side was self-recorded and self-produced by Clark, who chose early on to invest his time into learning the craft of recording rather than relying on traditional studio environments. This comes across in how honest the music is in its execution and being completely self-made.
“I create music mostly for myself because I enjoy writing,” Clark says. “That said, I hope people connect with these songs as something made passionately and genuinely – something they want to return to and listen to again.”
That ethos runs through Wayward Sparrow as a whole: music built on instinct, space and clarity over perfection. Slight imperfections become part of the overall language, giving the songs a sense of character that polished production often smooths away. And in the case of “Wayward Sparrow”, it’s exactly that balance. – between movement and stillness, story and space, that sets it apart.
About Wayward Sparrow
Wayward Sparrow is the independent project of Detroit based songwriter Rich Clark. Originally starting out as a heavy metal guitarist, Clark gradually found his way into country, folk, and Americana drawn to the storytelling and simplicity of the form. That shift shaped a sound built around space and atmosphere rather than layered production.
All music under the Wayward Sparrow name is self-recorded and self-produced, reflecting a deliberate choice to learn the craft and keep the process entirely hands-on.
William May’s debut chapbook, Blaze Without Burning (Finishing Line Press, May 30, 2025), announces the arrival of a poet interested less in certainty than in reflection, revision, and the quiet instability of meaning. Structured around a striking mirrored design, the collection pairs each early poem with a later counterpart, creating a built-in act of return. What emerges is not repetition, but reinterpretation—an evolving conversation between versions of the self, where memory, language, and feeling are never quite fixed.
The “twin poem” structure is the book’s defining gesture, and it feels less like formal experimentation than philosophical inquiry. Each pairing resists the idea that a poem can ever fully resolve itself on first encounter. Instead, May builds a space where the reader is asked to reconsider what they thought they understood, to sit with the discomfort and clarity that come from seeing the same emotional terrain from a shifted angle. The effect is cumulative: meanings accrue, fracture, and reform across the book’s mirrored halves.
At the center of this formal design is a voice that is intimate without being confessional in a conventional sense. May writes with a restraint that allows emotion to surface indirectly, often through detail rather than declaration. Childhood moments, fragments of family life, and instances of private recognition appear with quiet force, never overstated but carefully held. The poems feel attentive to the small architecture of experience—the way a single image or memory can carry disproportionate emotional weight.
May’s personal history informs the work in subtle but resonant ways. Diagnosed as neurodivergent at a young age, he has spoken about early struggles with reading and the long arc from perceived limitation to creative fluency. That trajectory is not foregrounded in the poems as explanation, but it hums beneath them as an ethic of attention: a sense that language is something earned slowly, precisely, and with care. The result is writing that often feels both hard-won and deeply deliberate.
The title Blaze Without Burning captures the book’s central tension: intensity without destruction, transformation without collapse. Across the collection, emotional heat is present but controlled, even elegiac. May is interested in what it means to feel deeply without being consumed by feeling, and his poems often linger in that charged middle space where clarity and ambiguity coexist.
Form and content are matched by an understated visual sensibility. The chapbook’s cover, featuring a watercolor work by Richard Frank (1947–2014), extends the book’s preoccupation with layering and perception. Frank’s dreamlike imagery complements the poems’ tonal balance—suggesting surfaces that hold depth beneath them, and images that shift depending on how long they are observed.
May’s path to publication adds another dimension to the work without overshadowing it. A lifelong New Yorker from Greenwich Village, he began writing poetry in childhood and continued through specialized educational support that helped shape his relationship to language. He later studied at institutions including Sarah Lawrence College and completed an MFA at the University of North Carolina. Alongside his writing, he hosts Argh! Not Another Book Publishing Podcast, where he explores the realities of the literary world with candor and curiosity.
Ultimately, Blaze Without Burning is a debut defined by its patience and precision. It resists urgency in favor of return, asking readers to come back again and again, each time with slightly altered understanding. In doing so, William May offers a collection that is less about arriving at meaning than about learning how meaning continues to shift after arrival.
Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Cédric Dind-Lavoie returns with “Chrysalide,” a textural, comforting, and quietly melancholic instrumental piece that moves between shelter and transformation. Rooted in folktronica and electroacoustic exploration, the track unfolds like a memory.
Intimate, enveloping, and gently evolving, it’s taken from Cédric’s upcoming album, Collages (2019–2022), a new series of studio explorations and reinterpretations of music originally created for contemporary dance and documentary film, set for release on April 17th.
“Chrysalide” took shape naturally around a two-part guitar motif. That repeating pattern inspired an arrangement steeped in childhood nostalgia, evoking the warmth and safety of a familiar refuge. From there, the composition expanded outward, layering subtle textures while maintaining a restrained emotional core.
The title “Chrysalide” reflects both protection and change. Suggesting the soothing nature of a cocoon while alluding to metamorphosis, the name mirrors the passage from childhood to adulthood, a space where vulnerability and growth coexist.
What distinguishes the track is its meticulous textural exploration. Modified guitar, harmonium, bass synth, autoharp, and carefully manipulated samples (many created from cardboard boxes) form an unexpected yet cohesive palette. The result is a surprising blend of organic and experimental elements, shaped into a soundscape that feels tactile and immersive.
For Cédric, production choices are always guided by intimacy. Even as the instrumentation shifts from project to project, his approach remains consistent: recording sounds closely and interpreting them with restraint and gentleness. The goal is not grandeur, but proximity; an enveloping sonic environment that invites listeners inward.
Modern Mystery 
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