Toronto-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Eliza Niemi grew up with the influence of music all around her. She first learned the basics of bass and guitar from her dad, and these childhood experiences of playing music together by ear fostered the sense of playfulness that she’s approached her craft with ever since. 

Her vibrational song, “Walking Feels Slow,” is about being caught between different ways of moving through the world: on the one side is taking things slow and stopping and smelling the roses, and on the other is a sort of reckless, free barrelling-through. 

“I wanted to evoke the feeling of desperately trying to stay present – the little games we play with ourselves and mantras we repeat to prevent us from projecting or worrying about the past or future,” says Eliza. “There’s a manic energy in trying to slow down and enjoy each bite as if it’s the whole fruit – a sort of buzzing at a high frequency – that I wanted to embody and convey in this track.”

Her self-produced new album, Staying Mellow Blows (Out August 5th), is about slowing down for the first time in a long time and having space and time to reflect on her life. She’d spent the majority of her adult years on the road with various bands such as Mauno and when the pandemic hit, she was suddenly and unexpectedly in one place for over a year. It was a shock to her system and brought about some serious introspection.

Combining what they learned from commercial rock contemporaries with elements they liked of Country and Pop songs, Toronto band, ASCENDIA, has created a body of work that will unfold upon multiple listens. 

Their dark and intense new single, “This War,” comes from their upcoming LP, PARASITE. 

It started off as being a motivational song about waging war against life, about accomplishing your goals and not quitting. But then the band had a conversation with their producer, Gavin Brown, who commented that the song sounds way more like it’s about internal struggle. 

He mentioned a time he was at dinner and he noticed a war vet sitting nearby and that he could feel this man was suffering. Gavin said the song reminded him of that guy and how the war never stopped for him. The band then changed it to the perspective that everyone has a war they are fighting; everybody faces adversities and we have to try our best to fight that war and win that war every day.

Since the theme of the song is about war, Ascendia wanted the song to have more of a raw and less polished feel to it. You can really hear it with the opening drum effect. 

Holistically, the album is mostly about expressing real, genuine feelings in a way that the listener could relate to. Human beings communicate through stories, and so it was incredibly important that there was clarity in the band’s message. Listeners can’t get directly into the minds of the songwriter, so the band needed to make sure the lyrics would tell the story in a clear, concise way.

DUUO, formerly known as A-Game, are twin brothers with a long history of accomplishments and accolades in the music industry. Representing Toronto, Rommel, aka ‘Nov’ and Robert, aka ‘Chase,’ are both energetic and skilled artists that compliment each other’s style.

Their third release of the year, the ambitious song, “No Reason,” was produced and written remotely with their longtime collaborator, Rich Homie Quan, and their recording engineer. 

It’s about living in the moment and going through the motions of it. One day, the brothers were in the studio recording til 9 a.m. in the morning with their mentor, and the next minute they were spending $100,000 in cash at the jewelry store. Sometimes, that’s just where life takes you!

With this carefree song, DUUO aims to tell listeners to just live your life. Especially after the pandemic, their motto has been “One life to live. Do what makes you happy for No Reason!”

Multi-talented singer, rapper and musician James Favron currently finds himself thriving in the city of Hamilton, ON, where his love for hip-hop, street fashion, and dreaming big have been revived following years of personal hardships that needed to be endured and ultimately, overcame, in order to truly find himself as an artist.

Favron’s newest single remixes his track “Better Days,” featuring a verse from fellow Hamiltonian LTtheMonk. The duo intentionally kept the musical backdrop as simple as possible, while giving it enough movement and build to not get boring. Keeping it to the same chord progression front-to-back gave them the opportunity to play with their lyrics in the verses and allow the words to move the listener along rather than the chords.

Watch and Listen here:

Étamine is the electronic music collaboration between multi-instrumentalists Brock Geiger and Ian Jarvis. Having spent the past 15 years performing, composing and recording in a multitude of settings, the duo have collectively contributed to over thirty records and played shows around the globe with their respective projects, Raleigh and Chairs.

Their bouncy, first single, “AntiBlue,” was written remotely, but collaboratively through recording and sending sessions and ideas to each other from their respective studios in Montreal and Calgary.

The goal for this song production-wise was to have it feel like the song cuts off abruptly and all of a sudden everything’s in slow motion, like suddenly you’re in this halftime daze. As if you’re going along with your life thinking everything’s great and all of a sudden BAM the whole rhythm of your life is thrown off and you’re trapped in this dizzying dream world.

“Like most of the songs on this album, we were trying to create a sonic atmosphere in which one could escape their everyday life,” says Ian. “In this case, it was the mundane reality of social isolation. The production was meant to be immersive – we want to transport the listener to another world.”

Listen and Watch here: 

Massachusetts-based folk singer-songwriter Dan Pallotta is sharing the second single from his upcoming LP, American Pictures, out October 5th. 

“Charity Town” connects directly to his career as a philanthropist, where Pallotta is sometimes asked to speak for local community foundations in towns that have lost their major economic drivers. 

This track reflects empathetically on the resilience and loss endured by citizens of these towns, who Pallotta describes as “the people left behind when the future has moved on.”

Featuring percussion composed by Pallotta’s fourteen-year-old daughter, “Charity Town” is a rousing yet intimate piece of storytelling folk, capturing the reality of the circumstances that have befallen these communities. 

Check out the official music video for “Charity Town” on YouTube: