Recorded with acclaimed producer Thomas D’Arcy (Neko Case, The Sheepdogs) and mixed by studio wiz Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, Whitney, REM), Altameda’s stunning new album, Born Losers, is a meditation on change, loss, and growth – but more than that, it’s a reckoning with mortality, a call to live while we’re still alive.

The band recorded the album after moving from Edmonton to Toronto, and Troy Snaterse wrote much of the lyrics during a tumultuous stretch in which he nearly lost his father to a stroke, only to lose his 18-year-old stepbrother just weeks later in a tragic accident. The resulting emotional upheaval permeates the music in ways both painful and transcendent, with raw, candid performances often arriving wrapped inside gorgeous, gently atmospheric arrangements. 

Soulful focus track, “Sweet Susie,” for instance, wrestles with powers that lay beyond our control before eventually finding peace in making the most of what little we actually can dictate. “You can blame it on all the cold clouds above,” Snaterse sings atop a slow burning groove. “Through the hate you’ve gotta find love.” 

Heather Green’s songwriting has accumulated several accolades and nominations (Music Nova Scotia, ECMAs), countless TV and movie spots (including Degrassi, Rookie Blue, Private Eyes), and hundreds of thousands of spins on Spotify.

She recorded “Close Enough” with award-winning producer Alexander Meade (Sofi Tukker, Aquakulture, Bit Funk), an exciting departure that brings out new tones and voicings in her melodic and lyrical structure. The earnest new single is about the blind optimism of being infatuated with someone. “Wanting to know how they are as a person, who they have been, and to be at the top of their list of best lovers,” Green says.

Good Fortune, the brainchild of Toronto songwriter, musician and visual artist Kelsey McNulty, creates a cinematic collage of sound both new and old on her debut self-titled album out this spring.

McNulty highlights a lyric from her new single, “I Know,” reasoning that it takes the view of glass half-full versus half-empty. “When one dream lives another dies. Every time you choose an adventure over time spent on your craft, or follow your inspiration on a project and miss out on something social, you are realizing a dream and putting another one aside, at least for a time. This is positive, it means feeling strongly enough about something in your life to let something else go and trust that it will be ok. There are always new dreams!”

With an affection for the ‘60s French pop of Francoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg, to space pop revivalists like Broadcast and Air – McNulty delivers her intimate and sultry vocals stylings (in both English and French) over intentional layers of dreamy synth, surf guitar, and an airtight rhythm section.

Warm and dark, soft with stabs of madness, poet and songwriter Jenny Berkel’s new album, These Are the Sounds Left from Leaving – out May 13th via Outside Music – blooms lushly with detail. Each song is set in the micro-world of a keen feeling observer, trying to parse a mindful moment in a setting where it feels impossible to drop a truth anchor – a post-Trump, heavily gaslit world where perceptions of reality remain distorted.

Written about a summer relationship that took place in a city with little gardens everywhere,  “Lavender City” intimately examines lies. A breakup song with crescendoing strings, insistent percussion and hopeful harmonies, it’s about gaining the capacity to see clearly again – but with the painful entailment of anatomizing the lies that drew you in.

International collaborators Catherine McCandless and Wynn Holmes are sharing “The Frequency,” their third single as Riches, composed with Sweden’s Dan Lissvik (Studio/Atelje). 

A gothic piece of dream pop which is inspired by the “desire to step outside of the limits of ourselves,” “The Frequency” shows the group evolving into a full band sound to chart the experience of togetherness.

“The frequency is: being swept up, being in love, longing and belonging, soothing and alive. It is a calling on the ethereal to take on form, on music to bring touch and connection over the frontiers of physical walls and distances,” explain the artists.