Toronto’s Ekelle rhymes about what she knows best: her real-life experience! Money, sex, drama, and identity stir together to create a style she calls Hood Pop – popular music with a street edge.

“Your baddies are your real ones, hustlers who get shit done and keep it moving,” Ekelle says about her aptly titled new single “Baddie,” which is “perfect for pre-gaming with your girls or driving around on a sunny day.”

Currently, Ekelle is an artist in the RBC Launchpad Music Entrepreneurship Program, guided by her instincts and a passion for music, pop culture and fashion. In 2022, Ekelle dropped her first album, Let’s Get It, landing song features on the video game Boogie, TV show Hudson & Rex and the Stanley Cup Finals. 

After years of crisscrossing North America, Europe, and the U.K., playing in bands such as Sam Weber and Luca Fogale, Jacob Weil found himself with a collection of his own songs that he was ready to share. The indie-folk debut record, Lived In, was produced by Sam Weber. The album’s production is fast, innovative, and intelligent, and the songs are filled with strength, grit, tenderness, courage, and nostalgia. And, like a string of images, Weil leads us through observations and experiences that have led him to where he is now.  

Co-written with Luca Fogale, the focus track “9999” is about multiple realities – more specifically it represents the nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine ways out of ten thousand that your life could have gone, had you made one specific decision, as opposed to another. It’s a reflection on a life, a relationship, whatever, where you made a decision, and things ended up one way instead of another. 

In this situation, the song is about a relationship that felt so right, where everything was so perfect, and yet it didn’t work out. It’s about imagining a multitude of realities, in which, if you lived the same life 10,000 times, you just happened to be living in the one where things didn’t work out. 

“The album started off as a collection of songs from different periods of my life – periods of significant growth and change,” explains Weil. “I didn’t begin with a set throughline between them, but it became apparent later on as I was looking back at them that they all shared a commonality – a reflection on what it feels like to be part way through one’s life and have a mind, body, spirit and even home that feel ‘lived in.’”

Joel Plaskett is a beloved east coast Canadian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music brings together the energetic melodies and hooks of power pop, the muscle of hard rock, and more intimate singer/songwriter fare. Plaskett’s songs are a perennial part of the national playlist, a fixture on “best of” lists, and the soundtrack to the lives of faithful fans across the country and around the world.

When the YMCA in Vancouver asked Plaskett to play at their “virtual campfire” over the pandemic in 2021, he figured he’d write a song for a real campfire and the real moon above. Written with the beautiful simplicity of three chords, Plaskett started and finished “Hey Moon (A Campfire Song)” 15 minutes prior to recording it for the livestream. 

“This version gets kind of rocking for the summer festival stages but it’s basically a folk song at heart,” says Plaskett. “My hope is people will write their own verses for the moon and sing the chorus together.”

In the 90s, iconic artist Chin Injeti fronted the R&B group Bass is Base which had fans all over the world and garnered him a deal with Canada’s Universal Music and Island Records in the United States. During that time, Bass is Base won a JUNO (Canadian Grammy) for Best R&B record and a MuchMusic Video award for their song “Funkmobile.” Additionally, Chin was dubbed SOCAN’s Songwriter of the Year… but this was just the beginning of his success.His latest EP, VESSELS: Volume Two, includes the melancholic yet humorous single “For Better or For Worse” (feat. YBTB). Life doesn’t always work out the way you planned. Evidently, you are not the same person you were when you were in your 20s or 30s. Chin and YBTB have crafted the perfect message that represents who they are and who they’ll be moving forward.

For 15 years, David Vertesi has appeared as an integral part of some of Canada’s most exciting indie-rock projects. Whether he’s playing in Hey Ocean!, Shad, Dear Rouge, Hannah Georgas, or Said the Whale, producing Haley Blais, Noble Son, Ashleigh Ball, or Riun Garner, Vertesi brings a uniquely sensuous and brooding sensibility, an intricate sonic depth that multiplies the layers of a song. 

In his solo work, these dramatic flairs ignite on full display. Vertesi has an equal command over choreographing lush technologic atmospheres of instrumentation as he does squeezing the naked emotional core from a piano, steady bass drum, and the soft plucking rhythm of a guitar. But it’s his own voice that distinguishes these spectrums of rough-and-tumble and tightly polished stories of confusion, loneliness, death, and ennui. Vertesi’s growling inimitable baritone deepens the tender poetry and sense of humour as he emerges centre-stage as a fully formed front-man of his own musical expression.

“This song was born out of the individual and collective renegotiation of self that I have witnessed since 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic,” Vertesi explains. “With my band of 15+ years [Hey Ocean!] on indefinite hiatus, I was attempting to do this for myself, however, I couldn’t help but notice pretty much everyone around me was doing the same: leaving jobs, moving cities, ending relationships. But whether mourning or celebrating the loss of our old lives it seemed like we were all asking ourselves the same question.”

If the pop-punk onslaught of the ‘90s and early 2000s left you with the impression that punk music loses its edge with the introduction of melodies and hooks, New York City quartet The Underbites are here to remind us all that accessibility and grit don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Founded by veteran guitarists and veteran listeners Jon Fox and Kurt Feldhun, The Underbites may have formed in 2020, but their origins date back to when Fox and Feldhun witnessed the halcyon days of punk first-hand. 

Their new EP, Four Songs About Girls, makes its debut today.

Listen here:

When Fox and Feldhun actually met at NYU at the dawn of the ‘80s, punk was branching out into thrilling permutations like post-punk and hardcore. “Kurt and I,” Fox explains, “really bonded over Bad Brains and GBH, but we didn’t actually play in that style when we started playing together.” The Underbites sound so energized in part because Fox and Feldhun spent their entire careers up to this point—in groups like Baby Tapeworm, The Cogs, The Behoovers, and Upchuck—playing other styles. 

For Fox and Feldhun, The Underbites is a return to some of their earliest musical loves. But you’re just as likely to hear a passing flash of, say, Attractions-era Elvis Costello in Feldhun’s playing as you are a chugga-chugga riff. In fact, for a band that describe themselves as “unrepentant traditionalists,” The Underbites give themselves lots of headroom to draw from whatever they feel like dialing-up. 

Listening to the band’s full-length debut Sort It Out alongside the new EP Four Songs About Girls, one is reminded that the music from the classic CBGB, SoCal, NYHC and Warped Tour scenes were all highly distinct from one another. But The Underbites possess such fluency with the punk canon that all the music flows as if from the same source. The Four Girls track “Sincerely Jemma Jane,” for example, started out as a Rancid-influenced anthem, but it ended up landing closer to Social Distortion. 

Further afield, Michael Hoffman‘s snare figure at the start of the Sort It Out cut “Che Guevarra,” nods to John Bonham’s iconic “Rock and Roll” intro, but he executes it with sufficient finesse to recall Los Lobos’ Louie Perez channeling lendgary Meters drummer Zigaboo Modeliste.

Lyrically, Fox draws as much from The Beach Boys, Squeeze and Robyn Hitchcock as he does from the Sex Pistols. With Sort It Out, The Underbites proved that provocative music can provoke thought in the best sense of the word. Whether tackling activist posturing, consumer culture, economic decline, racial division, the sleazy machinations of politics, or polarizing figures like Donald Trump and Michael Moore, Fox is masterful at jolting listeners with an initial shock that, on closer inspection, reveals layers of thought.