GHOSTKEEPER ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM, BALLOON MOON, SHARES TITLE TRACK

August 18, 2026

**GHOSTKEEPER TO RELEASE BALLOON MOON, OCTOBER 27, 2026 VIA VICTORY POOL RECORDS**

WATCH / SHARE “BALLOON MOON” HERE
BUY / STREAM “BALLOON MOON” HERE

**PRE-SAVE BALLOON MOON HERE**

PAST PRAISE FOR GHOSTKEEPER

“a re-conjuring of joy that mingles with wounds past and present, thrusting them to the forefront of a musical partnership that spans decades, land, time and space. … amongst the tapestry woven by Cîpayak Joy's multilayered extension of contemporary electronica, Ghostkeeper's past, present and future dance hand in hand.” Exclaim!

“The pop experimentalists return to their roots while pushing their creativity forward on new album, Cîpayak Joy.” RANGE Magazine

Photo Credit : Jared Sych // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Balloon Moon is the latest offering from celebrated Métis pop experimentalists Ghostkeeper, their seventh album since emerging onto the scene nearly 20 years ago. The band is based in the Mohkinstsis/Calgary area, which is home to the “confluence” where the Bow and Elbow rivers meet. This historic site provided inspiration and a thematic guiding light for the album, and reflections on their place in the world can be found sprinkled throughout these compelling new songs. Their last album, the critically-acclaimed Cîpayak Joy, was centred around the core duo of founding members Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle, who built the album from scratch at their home studio, incorporating a degree of experimentation not yet heard on Ghostkeeper albums to date.

Balloon Moon gets the rest of the band – drummer Eric Hamelin and bassist Ryan Bourne (Hair Control, Chad Van Gaalen) – back in the room together, and the results, mostly cooked up collectively in studio, are stellar. The album's first single “Mohkinstsis” was recently featured by the CBC as one of “4 songs you need to hear to celebrate Indigenous History Month”, and its fond reminiscences of the core duo's early days together set the tone perfectly for an album that explores both the world around them as well as more abstract, introspective musings.

Today, they share the title track from the album. “The ‘Balloon Moon’ is a sacred talisman that rises to give me light, hope and inspiration when I need it most,” explains Shane. “It is the medicinal and protective manifestation of the love between Sarah and I … and it shines even in this grotesque and heartbreaking climate of perpetual colonial/ capitalist desecration of humanity and of our Mother Earth. This song is a prayer for all those who are brutally affected. Hiy Hiy.”

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MORE ABOUT BALLOON MOON
“Scars On Scars” kicks off the album in classic Ghostkeeper fashion, with an intricate, winding weave of guitar and bass lines, at once psychedelically disorienting and catchy as hell. The song quickly settles into a distinctly '70s feel with Hamelin's mercurial drumming moving between a tumbling pattern and a propulsive, backbeat-driven groove. But that description really only gets you part of the way there; once the beat settles in and Ghostkeeper's traces of melody begin to coalesce, there is truly no one else that sounds like this.

“I Want Love” is a feast for fans of the electric guitar, especially of the late '70s variety. The opening lick slyly recalls early tones by The Cars, before shifting into a spiky lick that could have been lifted from Robert Quine's masterful playing on Richard Hell's punk classic Blank Generation. “Tomb Rose” and “Love and Free Will” (which also features additional guitar from session ace JJ Mayo) also feature this prickly, ear-grabbing playing style, and also hearkens back to some of the earlier Ghostkeeper albums, albeit with the benefit of a decade of constant evolution and boundary-pushing.

The album takes a turn into the most angular corner of the album on “Tomb Rose”, a careening series of tightly synced band figures, funk guitars, and some impressive moves on the bass courtesy of Ryan Bourne. The vocals wander across this complex tapestry of band action, alternating between smears of analog delay trails and tightly arranged layers of stacked vocal harmonies.

Balloon Moon features two mini-songs tucked into its tracklist; “Every Wild Flower” is a brief dip into a doo-wop adjacent reverie, lovingly tripped out with tape vari-speed manipulations, clacking castanet percussion, and layers of vocals moving around the stereo field. “Across A Vast Vast Distance” provides another moment of respite with an undulating, ambient soundscape providing an immersive background for a brief passage of ominous spoken word.

WATCH / SHARE “MOHKINSTSIS” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MOHKINSTSIS” HERE

“Blot Out The Sun” begins in a more straightforward manner, recalling Shane's solo work under his own full name, before morphing into one of the trippier, more immersive listening experiences on Balloon Moon. This is not a shocking avenue for the band to explore; all members share a penchant for experimental approaches to music and sound, drawing inspiration from musique concrète (the practice of using sound itself as musical material), free jazz, and film score sound design. “We wanted to figure out how we can make things more unpredictable while still remaining tasty,” Ghostkeeper says. Jay Crocker (aka JOYFULTALK), a longtime collaborator and former band member, mixed the album and played a powerful role in this regard. “Working with Jay always turns out to be something you never expected, and sometimes I'm even nervous before putting on a mix for the first time,” Shane laughs, “but it always turns out to be amazing and sounds like nothing else.”

The album was produced by Josh Rob Gwilliam, head honcho at OCL Studios. The addition of Gwillam in the producer's chair was a sea change moment for Ghostkeeper, having previously worked with only a small cast of familiar players in this role. At first, there was a fleeting moment of apprehension at bringing someone new into the fold, but that feeling quickly evaporated, thanks in part to what Shane calls Gwillam's “old school studio bedside manner”. Balloon Moon carries the distinction of being the least pre-planned of any of the band's albums, and while this was an intentional choice to keep things fresh and intuitive, “Josh sensed my mild anxiety at not having every last detail ready to go,” Shane says with a laugh. But this allowed the producer to contribute in meaningful and unexpected ways; as the band created parts and arrangements in the moment, “he knew when to step in with a suggestion, or simply let us grind it out on the spot,” Shane remembers. “Every Wild Flower” and “Tomb Rose” are great examples of this synergistic pairing; “he helped us build layers and layers of vocals built right on the spot. Nothing was planned, but the vibe and chemistry in the room was just so good, it felt effortless.”

**PRE-SAVE BALLOON MOON HERE**

Album closer “To The Earth” is another deep dive into the world of abstract sound and free-flowing, expressive rhythm that has clearly grabbed Ghostkeeper's attention on Balloon Moon. Featuring the sole vocal from founding member Sarah Houle, sitting atop a wordless melody from Shane, the song has an incantory quality, with Hamelin's constantly permutating rhythms swirling around layers of keyboard drones. “I pushed Hamelin to be as busy as he wanted to be on of these tracks,” Shane says, and as a drummer who can pull off everything from a straightforward backbeat to beautifully dense free-jazz maelstroms of sound, we are treated here to his finest moments on a Ghostkeeper album to date.

Balloon Moon is both a return to form, of sorts, and also a bold new step forward. The album bristles with the immediacy that one can achieve through collective, real-time collaboration in a comfortable and open studio environment, and also benefits from the presence of a real, working, organic unit of players guided by a steady hand in the production chair. This is a vital and compelling band working at the top of their powers, and it will be a joy to see these songs come to life onstage in the coming months.

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BALLOON MOON TRACKLIST
01 Scars on Scars
02 Mohkinstsis
03 I Want Love
04 Every Wild Flower
05 Tomb Rose
06 Blot Out The Sun
07 My Child
08 Love And Free Will
09 Across A Vast Vast Distance
10 Balloon Moon
11 To The Earth

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GHOSTKEEPER RETURNS WITH NEW SINGLE / VIDEO, “MOHKINSTSIS”

May 20, 2026

WATCH / SHARE “MOHKINSTSIS” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MOHKINSTSIS” HERE

PAST PRAISE FOR GHOSTKEEPER

“The pop experimentalists return to their roots while pushing their creativity forward on new album, Cîpayak Joy.” RANGE Magazine

Photo Credit : Jared Sych // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

“Mohkinstsis” is the brand new single from Calgary Métis pop experimentalists Ghostkeeper. It's the first missive since their last album, the critically-acclaimed Cîpayak Joy. Centred around the core duo of founding members Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle, “Mohkinstsis” gets the rest of the band – drummer Eric Hamelin (JOYFULTALK) and bassist Ryan Bourne (solo, Chad Van Gaalen) – back in the room together, and the results are stellar.

The band's playing provides a robust framework for Shane's storytelling, expertly nuanced but never drawing attention to itself. Subtle sonic colourings in the margins add a sense of tension and release for the song's key moments, and it all rides out in a dreamy, quasi-doo wop reverie, Hamelin's tumbling drums tussling with a more developed version of the opening guitar lick. The mix, by longtime Ghostkeeper associate and JOYFULTALK mastermind Jay Crocker, is roomy and spacious mix, allowing the song room to breathe, and revel in the dramatic sonic vistas that emerge from simmering, in-the-pocket rhythm section-led sections.

The song itself is both a nostalgia-laden origin story of Ghostkeeper and Houle's romantic beginnings, and also an offering of sincere thanks to the various communities that welcomed them so warmly upon their initial move to Calgary years ago. Chief among these communities were the Blackfoot people, Shane recalls. “They were so welcoming, so nourishing and supportive when we first got here”, he says. “Not long after moving here, I was gifted an eagle feather as a welcoming token, and it hangs from the headstock of my guitar to this day.”

WATCH / SHARE “MOHKINSTSIS” HERE
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Before living together, Shane would – literally – run from his house north of the Bow river (‘vintage kicks look sweet on concrete’ he sings) to meet Sarah after work, stopping only for a short breather on the picturesque Crescent Heights ridge, which overlooks the river and downtown Calgary. While bracing himself for the rest of his journey, he'd find himself gazing down at the confluence where the Bow meets the Elbow river, imagining what it would have been like in its days as a Blackfoot nation encampment.

Thanks to his participation in filmmaker Trevor Solway's Amplify, an acclaimed docu-series focused on Indigenous singer-songwriters, Shane was able to meet and talk with various Blackfoot elders as part of the project. It was in these meetings he learned that, historically, the Blackfoot people were well known for welcoming people of other nations to meet at the confluence to prepare for their journeys west to the holy waters of the Banff hot springs, and Ghostkeeper couldn't help but see a parallel with his own feelings of welcome in the community. He began to regard the confluence as “two rivers that meet like lovers forged in destiny” a perfect metaphor for these early romantic years with Houle.

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GHOSTKEEPER RELEASES NEW LP, CÎPAYAK JOY, SHARES NEW VIDEO

August 28, 2024

GHOSTKEEPER’S CÎPAYAK JOY OUT TODAY VIA VICTORY POOL RECORDS

WATCH / SHARE “STORM CHASER” HERE

**BUY / STREAM CÎPAYAK JOY HERE**

The pop experimentalists return to their roots while pushing their creativity forward on new album, Cîpayak Joy.” RANGE Magazine

Photo Credit : Jared Sych // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Available everywhere today, Cîpayak Joy is the new album from Ghostkeeper, the ever-evolving project of Métis pop experimentalists Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle. The new LP follows their critically-acclaimed 2023 Polaris Music Prize long-listed album Multidimensional Culture.

To celebrate the album’s release, Ghostkeeper is sharing the new video for “Storm Chaser”, an homage “to the moment when these two lovers chose to accept a mutual invitation to propel themselves into the iconic, formidable and epic storm that arises when one decides to battle their ego – a sincere and fierce commitment to romance and progressive individualism so as to gift each other true love,” says Shane.

WATCH / SHARE “STORM CHASER” HERE

MORE ABOUT GHOSTKEEPER AND CÎPAYAK JOY
In recent years, the band has been operating as a full five piece band – and they still are – but this particular missive from Ghostkeeper offers a new take on their sound; it's at once a bold step forward and also a return to some of the band's earliest roots.

The album is replete with strangely inviting, otherworldly noises and a raft of sounds, rhythms, and textures that borrow liberally from trap music and reveal a sly interest in sounds and rhythms from the futuristic-sounding sonic architecture of contemporary R&B acts like FKA Twigs, Doja Cat, Vince Staples, and Rosalía. From the chirping, digitized cicada sounds that open first single “Lipstick” and the minimal beats and floating, effected vocals of “Sleep Dream” to the auto-tuned vocals and celestial synthesizer environs of “Dark At The Helm”, the album is a bold new sonic language for the band. And when one does hear a familiar sound, such as the acoustic guitar that snakes through album opener “Astum Ota”, it's filtered through a pleasingly psychedelic lens. Elsewhere, minimal synths, playful hi-hat syncopations, and dub-like snare hits radiate into the background, samples of speech intermingle with hallucinatory shifting textures and smeared voices.

Cîpayak is a Cree term that translates as 'the ghosts are dancing' and it is often used to describe the Northern Lights. Originally in the running as an alternative to the Ghostkeeper band name, Shane and Sarah finally adopted it as the moniker for their collective visual art practice, which had its debut at Contemporary Calgary in April of 2020 with their interactive piece Four Words Challenge. That show included a few pieces of music the two had spontaneously cooked up with tech wizard and longtime engineer Brad Hawkins, and following this initial jolt of inspiration, the three began descending to the basement for a string of collaborative, off-the-cuff sessions. These sessions quickly became defined by new working methods that were the direct inverse to those that have produced the ‘Ghostkeeper sound’ to date, and the three uncovered some truly fresh new sonic territory for the band.

WATCH / SHARE “LIPSTICK” HERE

“Brad would come down to the basement, Sarah would work up a drum beat, and I'd start improvising, coming up with different vocal ideas and other melodic parts, finding the songs in the sounds,” Shane recalls. “It was all about being immediate, with no premeditated ideas.” This 'no songs first' approach of Cîpayak Joy was a radical reinvention of their creative process, but more than anything else, this project represents a return to that core band trajectory that Shane and Sarah originally laid down in their halcyon days. And, possibly in keeping with this sense of coming full circle with the band, Shane and Sarah decided to reach out to Jay Crocker, one of their oldest musical associates, to bring his highly unique perspective to the album.

Jay Crocker is a multi-faceted composer, producer, and musician living on the south shore of Nova Scotia. He's well-known in experimental music circles for his run of JOYFULTALK albums on the venerable Constellation Records, and has co-produced the last three albums for Sackville-based songwriter Jon McKiel, including the critically-acclaimed Bobby Joe Hope. And perhaps more crucially, Crocker also played guitar in the one of the earliest Ghostkeeper band lineups, which led to him recording and producing their albums Ghostkeeper (2010) and Horse Chief! War Thief! (2013).

WATCH / SHARE “RAVEN” HERE

While the band initially approached him with the idea of mixing a few tunes, Crocker, as he often does, saw the project from another angle, and the band eventually gave him carte blanche, as producer, to re-imagine the album as only he could. “I wanted to see what was in there,” Crocker says, and with an arsenal of samplers, drum machines, and synths, he dug in. Once he began excavating the songs' innards, he compared his working method at times to collaging; with his keen eye for detail and almighty hook, Crocker would locate an element of interest (a vocal riff, a drumbeat, a synth sparkle), pluck it from its original context – sometimes literally stretching, inverting, or otherwise wholly manipulating the existing material – and put it back together in new and unexpected ways. Even Crocker himself was surprised at how radical some of the reinventions were, admitting “I don't know if I've ever taken it as far as this, just stripping the whole thing back to the vocal and re-building the song around that.” He likened the process to “building a digital sculpture of something that was,” but ultimately he viewed his role in the classic producer/artist mold; “I tried to give the songs whatever they needed - or didn't need.” The end result is endlessly engaging, singular, and, as both Ghostkeeper and Crocker insist, impossible to create without the other.

This record does indeed foreground the core duo of Shane and Sarah, but they are highly aware of the fact without the tech savvy and good vibes that Brad Hawkins brought to those initial basement production sessions, this project would not have materialized (and the record also benefits from a few remote contributions from live band members Eric Hamelin and Ryan Bourne, who supplied drum sounds and synth samples at various stages). And despite the fact that Crocker's role in the birth of Cîpayak Joy is crucial enough to have part of his band name added to this album's title, he is also quick to point out that “it doesn't happen without Shane and Sarah. I just try to contribute whatever magic I can. It's just good to be a part of it.”

**BUY / STREAM CÎPAYAK JOY HERE**

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CÎPAYAK JOY TRACKLIST
01 Astum Ota
02 Lipstick
03 Raven
04 Phantom
05 Dark At The Helm
06 Sleep Dream
07 Storm Chaser
08 Maps

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