Toronto-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist SHEAL has found something worth saying with her sophomore LP Courage Again (out now). Writing the album over the span of several years with the constraints of being a mother and teacher, and recording most of it at eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child, Courage Again is deeply reflective of love, fear and motherhood. 

Courage Again is about how love makes your inner and outer world expand and how fear makes your inner and outer world contract. It’s about my experience and learnings around pushing through fear rather than running away from it, hence the title of the album. – SHEAL

The album’s newest single, “Noa’s Song,” was inspired by the birth of SHEAL’s niece and completed after the birth of her first daughter. Dedicated to all of her siblings’ children, the lyrics are about literally pushing through pain and fear while also metaphorically relating to the themes of love and fear that weave through Courage Again.

Mear is an indie pop collaboration between singer-songwriter Frances Miller and electronic composer Greg Harrison. Together, their music combines catchy melodies and poignant lyrics with their shared love of experimental music. Miller and Harrison met while working at the music venue Massey Hall in Toronto and began collaborating shortly thereafter by sending tracks back and forth over social media. 

“The Order” is a redemptive new single from their first full-length album, Soft Chains, slated for release on April 21st. Miller details her early experiences living with a chronic illness and grieving the loss of her health.

https://linktr.ee/mearband

Miller reveals, “in 2014, I lost the ability to do a lot of things I had previously taken for granted. At the time I wrote this I couldn’t read for more than a few minutes at a time and a short walk around the block could leave me bedridden the next day. ‘The Order’ was an attempt to voice some of the pain and the loneliness of that; of not understanding what was happening to me.”

Malcolm Burn is a Grammy Award winning record producer, best known for having worked with Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, and The Tragically Hip among many others. In his other artistic life, he is a songwriter, singer and a recording artist.

Love, loss and the fragility of the human psyche are explored in his new solo album, the silence in your head, with the title track displaying a deep understanding of the fleeting aspects of time and human existence. Listen to the album in full here, a culmination of almost two decades worth of songwriting by Malcolm that incorporates an array of influences both new and old.

Ottawa-born Laurence DaNova developed a passion for singing and the arts at a young age, singing in a band throughout his teens before he released Nine Hundred, his first self-produced EP with his former band, Vista Del Mar. In 2019, Laurence began to work with producers to develop his unique sound, combining experimental pop, neo-soul, and alternative rock. 

Following his series of well-received singles and videos, Laurence is back with “Marsupial,” a melancholy and downtempo track which showcases his vocals and reinterprets Leonard Corcuerea’s poem of the same name.

“When the time comes that you’ve outgrown me, will you hunt for me or will you hunt me?” For Laurence, this line sums up the central theme of “Marsupial.” 

“You can be so closely bound to someone and show them the ways of life, only for them to just leave and betray you,” he states.

The song’s music video, shot in the Bucegi Mountains of central Romania, captures the loneliness of “Marsupial.” “You feel so small among the mountains and plateaus,” explains DaNova.

Ben Sures is a storyteller. On his poignant new acoustic album, The Story That Lived Here (out Jan 21st), the Edmonton-based songwriter, guitarist and author sings stories told to him by friends, and fans. Stream the LP here.

Sures’ catalogue is eclectic, spanning folk, country, jazz and rock’n’roll, and borrowing from blues, Sinti swing and West African guitar. His funny, honest, quirkily wise and wistful tunes are accompanied by old friends Richard Moody (viola, violin, mandolin and vocals) and Scott White (upright bass), along with Rebecca Campbell on backup vocals and percussion. 

Nearly every song on ‘North Americana’-tinged The Story That Lived Here has a strong yet tender sing-along chorus, including his moving single “Cry Like A Flood,” which is Kat Goldman’s true story of her music career interrupted following an accident that changed the course of her life. 

Neo-new-wave and industrial-pop project, Pleasure Craft, has drawn inspiration from a difficult time when principal songwriter, Sam Lewis, grappled with extreme isolation, his mother’s cancer diagnosis, the beginning of the pandemic, and a breakup — all within a period of six months.

Drawing on two years of psychotherapy sessions and exploring the fear of vulnerability drawing Lewis’ behaviour, Pleasure Craft’s forthcoming debut album, Walls, Mirrors and Windows, is a deeply cathartic collection of songs.

“Dead Weight,” the fifth song on the LP, is a heavy, bass and drum driven industrial track that finds the album’s protagonist grappling with self loathing and fear brought on by a newfound self awareness and introspection: “He’s a kid, he’s a soul, he’s a rag doll, he’s a chemical, he’s a bag in the wind, he’s a tag in, he’s a swimmer in a current.”