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.

Canadian singer-songwriter Shiloh Lindsey shares “Wolves In Your Head,” a haunting, restless and ultimately resilient folk-noir track and the second single to be revealed from her forthcoming album, The Western Veil, set for release on November 6th, 2026. Pairing bluesy acoustic guitar with hypnotic rhythms and otherworldly electric textures, the song turns familiar Western imagery inward, transforming a wilderness stalked by wolves into a metaphor for the fears, thoughts, and difficult parts of ourselves that can prove impossible to outrun.

The song grew from Shiloh’s concern for the mental health struggles she witnessed around her, informed by both her own experiences and her work as a mental health worker in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. From there emerged an image: someone alone in the wilderness, huddled around a tiny fire, searching for the language to tell another person how they’re really doing.

“The wolves represent the fears, thoughts and difficult parts of ourselves that can circle in our heads,” Shiloh explains. “The Wild West imagery eventually becomes an internal landscape – the ‘wildest’ territory can sometimes be our own mind.”

As the song unfolds, its relationship with those wolves begins to change. Initially something to fear and fight off, by the end they are invited to sit beside the fire. Drawing on lessons Shiloh encountered through therapy and shadow work, the transformation reflects an understanding that healing does not always mean defeating or eliminating our darker impulses. Sometimes it means learning why they exist and changing the way we meet them.

That idea extends into the bridge, which references the familiar “Two Wolves” parable about opposing forces within ourselves and the belief that whichever wolf we feed will ultimately grow stronger. Shiloh, however, pushes the story somewhere less binary. “Instead of deciding one wolf is good and the other bad,” she asks, “What if we learn why they’re both there and invite them to the fire?”

The recording builds its own strange wilderness around that idea. Producer Jesse Waldman spent considerable time searching for the right guitar voice after a conventional approach failed to capture the world of the lyrics. Using ambient electric guitar through a TC Electronic Flashback 2 pedal on its reverse setting, he created ethereal, almost animalistic sounds that hover around the arrangement like the wolves themselves.

Those textures are paired with Shiloh’s bluesy acoustic guitar and almost disco-like drums and bass, creating an unusual tension between darkness and movement. Beneath the brooding subject matter is something unexpectedly propulsive and hopeful, while the reversed electric guitar ensures a sense of unease never entirely disappears.

That contradiction is central to “Wolves In Your Head.” Rather than promising that darkness can simply be conquered, the song asks what might happen if we stopped running long enough to understand it. The wilderness remains. The wolves remain. What changes is who gets invited closer to the fire.

Lebanese-Canadian artist Raphaela shares “Take It Back,” a nostalgic, uplifting pop single caught between memory and uncertainty. Vivid and cinematic, the track looks back at a love that once felt effortless while confronting how different it has become.

The idea took shape during a writing session in Nashville with Jordan Lake. When asked what she wanted to write about that day, Raphaela noticed an old Dolly Parton vinyl titled I Wish I Felt This Way at Home. Surrounded by the excitement and inspiration of Nashville, the phrase made her consider what happens when a person who once felt like home suddenly doesn’t anymore.

The title initially suggests wanting a relationship back, but its meaning gradually shifts. “Taking it back” becomes less about reversing an ending than revisiting an earlier time when everything was new and full of possibility. “There’s a sadness in knowing you may need to let something go while still longing for the version of it that once felt like home,” Raphaela explains.

That conflict crystallizes in the lyric, “Would it be all for nothing if I leave you now?” It’s a question Raphaela sees extending beyond romance to friendships, careers, or anything into which we have poured significant parts of ourselves.

“When we’ve invested so much of ourselves into something, even when we know in our gut that it’s time to leave, we can spend so much time wondering whether walking away somehow erases everything that came before it,” she says. “I think the song lives in that tension – knowing something can have been meaningful, beautiful and real, even if it isn’t meant to last forever.”

Months after the initial Nashville session, Josh Bogert joined Raphaela to reshape and produce the track, translating that push and pull into cinematic pop. Its structure mirrors the progression: verse one lives in memory, verse two introduces doubt, and the chorus is where the two collide.

“Take It Back” marks the first chapter in a larger body of work that moves through memory, doubt, grief, longing, relapse, and eventually hope. Here, Raphaela establishes the story at its point of uncertainty, before the songs that follow venture deeper into its emotional fallout.

Continuing to push beyond the sound established on their breakout debut EP, Toronto indie quintet Next Week’s Washing shares “Clear Eyes,” a massive, dreamy, and cinematic new single that brings alternative rock energy together with densely layered shoegaze. Taken from the band’s forthcoming sophomore EP, Spiral, set for release on November 13th, the track represents their most expansive recording yet, combining walls of textured instrumentation with upfront vocals and a growing confidence in the sound they can distinctly call their own.

“Clear Eyes” was the first song Next Week’s Washing wrote after completing their debut EP. Rather than starting over, the band approached the track as an opportunity to take the foundations they had already established and push them somewhere bigger.

“We wanted to take the sound we had begun to develop with the first six songs and push it forward,” the band explains. “We took a lot more time building layers into the recording, and the result is our biggest (sonically) sounding song yet.”

That progression can be heard throughout the track. While the instrumentation leans heavily into the band’s shoegaze influences, Next Week’s Washing deliberately pushed the vocals forward in the mix, allowing the songwriting to remain present within the song’s towering layers of guitars. The result lands somewhere between the immersive atmosphere of shoegaze and the immediacy of alternative and indie rock, bringing the different sides of the band’s identity into sharper focus.

For Next Week’s Washing, that convergence of influences is precisely what makes “Clear Eyes” significant. Rather than sounding indebted to any single reference point, the band sees the track as one of the clearest representations yet of what their own sound can become.

“It’s probably the truest blend of all our influences that we’ve ever written,” they share. “It feels like something only Next Week’s Washing could’ve written, and we’re proud of that.”

The song’s title arrived only after the music and lyrics were already complete. Fans of the television series Friday Night Lights, the band found themselves returning to Coach Taylor’s recurring mantra, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” The phrase unexpectedly aligned with the meaning they had already discovered within the song, giving the track its name and adding another layer to its perspective.

“Clear Eyes” describes how it feels to move through life when you’re young and everything is in flux. Sometimes you thrive on the uncertainty and at other times you really want straight answers or a direct path forward. You can get knocked around quite a bit, even when you try to plan ahead or think things through. Ultimately the song is a call to trust your instincts and enjoy the ride – we’re all in it together.

One of the recording’s defining moments emerged just as spontaneously. The song’s breakdown was initially conceived as entirely instrumental, but after hearing the completed arrangement in the studio, the band felt something was missing. They wrote a short poem to test over the section, unsure whether the words would work rhythmically against the music. When Miles stepped up to record it, the experiment immediately clicked.

That instinctive moment reflects the larger evolution behind “Clear Eyes.” As Next Week’s Washing progress into the era of their second EP, the band are becoming increasingly comfortable expanding their arrangements without sacrificing the directness at the heart of their songwriting. The scale may be growing, but their perspective remains grounded in documenting the world as they experience it.

“When we’re writing a song, we like to try and embody the perspective that our generation has on the world,” the band explains. “We feel like it’s part of our duty as we’re coming up with the next generation of great music.”

Toronto singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Maya Killtron returns with “Touch This Body,” a playful, groove-soaked new single that explores one of pop music’s most overlooked subjects: keeping romance alive after the honeymoon phase. Blending post-disco, funk, soul, contemporary R&B, neo-soul, and quiet storm influences, the track captures the confidence, chemistry, and intentional effort required to keep long-term love feeling exciting years after the first spark.

While countless love songs celebrate new attraction or heartbreak, “Touch This Body” turns its attention to what happens after the butterflies settle. Inspired by Maya’s own reflections on lasting relationships, the song embraces the reality that intimacy doesn’t simply sustain itself. It evolves, requiring playfulness, vulnerability, and the willingness to rediscover one another.

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically?

The song is about keeping the fire in long term love. The hard work that we’re only just starting to talk about. Touch This Body is another great collaboration with Producer HiFiLo. I told him we wanted to go in a Prince and Sheila E direction and he delivered the perfect blend of both – a fantastic mood for love 10yrs in. It just felt like the perfect song for a video. Rob Dunn both DOP, Director and owner of the beautiful 1962 Chevy Impala, took the reins for the video highlighting the best in lowrider culture to mirror the vibe in production.

2. What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?

We wanted to highlight a feeling from a different time. Toronto in the 80’s, more specifically South Etobicoke but in technicolour. There’s so much you can feature in Toronto and I want to do that with all of the videos for this album!

3. What was the process of making this video?

We took 2 days to shoot the video on location in South Etobicoke Toronto. On day with the car and another on location with the cameo guys and our night shot. All of the editing magic was done by Rob Dunn in post. A very small team so we could move around and shoot quickly and head to the next location. A huge team effort all around to complete the project in 2 short days. Plus shout out to Gus Tacos Etobicoke for our post shoot dinner!