MAGI MERLIN SHARES NEW VIDEO FOR “SO SMART” FROM UPCOMING LP

MAGI MERLIN’S DEBUT ALBUM, POWER HOUSE, DUE OUT VIA BONSOUND JULY 10, 2026

WATCH / SHARE “SO SMART” HERE
BUY / STREAM “SO SMART” HERE

PRE-SAVE POWER HOUSE HERE

LISTEN TO MAGI MERLIN TALK ABOUT “POPSTAR” AND POWER HOUSE ON CBC Q WITH TOM POWER

“a confident, effortlessly cool club banger.” Exclaim! On “SpiceKick”

Photo Credit : Vladim Vilain // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

On “So Smart”, Magi Merlin writes herself a pacifying ode to self-kindness, recognising that, in truth, no one else holds the authority to give us the empathy we need most but ourselves. The combination of her layered vocals and radical instrumentation almost lends the song a three-dimensional feel. The single and video arrive as the third installment ahead of her debut album POWER HOUSE, which comes out July 10, 2026.

As Magi puts it, "'So Smart' is an ode to finding sympathy for your own self. We made it in Mexico City and I ended up having a full meltdown, broke ten years of vegetarianism over a taco and felt like a complete fraud. Funky told me I had to be nicer to myself, and then Sam played the song back and that line was just there: 'I'll push to be kinder to myself... I guess.' It's essentially about getting over myself in the most empathetic way possible."

WATCH / SHARE “SO SMART” HERE
BUY / STREAM “SO SMART” HERE

Co-writing and co-producing with long-time collaborator Funkywhat, Magi leads on her own art direction, shaping a visual world as self-defined and infectious as the music. Magi’s alternative shapeshifting R&B is about as high-definition as one can imagine, without ever sacrificing sensuousness and emotion while exploring life's deep existential truths. She tears through imagination and genre like outfits ripped off a clothing rack––a Galliano tulle skirt to a studio visit, lace wrist cuffs for a first date, or jungle-inspired kick drums giving way to futuristic synth lines.

This exploration of the self comes following the vivid single and video for “SpiceKick”. A loud, flashy, and seemingly arrogant track, decoding ‘plastic confidence,’ and showcasing how arrogance can often be a mask for an underlying fear of inadequacy. From this artifice to the radical, empathetic self-reflection of “So Smart”, her debut album POWER HOUSE won't be lulled into comfort; it holds itself in opposition to the systems that slowly hollow out our sense of self.

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

Both follow lead single “POPSTAR” which was featured on CBC Q alongside an interview as well as being premiered on Huw Stephens' BBC Radio 6 Music show, picked up a B-list placement and had repeat plays on New Music Fix and a place on Spotify's Fresh Finds Favorites in March 2026. The single arrived as Magi was wrapping a European support run with Yaya Bey, the latest in a string of momentum that's been building steadily across both sides of the Atlantic. This spring, Magi also makes her acting debut in Chandler Levack's Mile End Kicks, which screened at TIFF and SXSW, and sees her acting alongside Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick and Juliette Gariépy.

WATCH / SHARE “POPSTAR” (VISUALIZER) HERE
BUY / STREAM “POPSTAR” HERE

LISTEN TO MAGI MERLIN TALK ABOUT “POPSTAR” AND POWER HOUSE ON CBC Q WITH TOM POWER

Magi [pronounced Mahd-j-eye] grew up in Montréal. Her 2022 EP Gone Girl earned praise from the likes of Bandcamp Daily, The FADER, The Line of Best Fit and Nylon, leading to tours with Noga Erez and a LATAM date with Omar Apollo. Her surprise EP, A Weird Little Dog, arrived as she opened a US tour for Nubya Garcia, followed by festival appearances at Osheaga, Festival d'été de Québec (opening for Ty Dolla $ign), Treefort, Reeperbahn and the Montreal International Jazz Festival.

With her debut album POWER HOUSE out July 10, Magi is about to reveal a big, sparkling new chamber of her craft. The title alone tells you she's not here to play it safe.

MAGI MERLIN LIVE
Fri, Jun 26, Mayenne, FR - Festival un Singe en Eté
Sat, Jun 27, Bailleul, FR - En Nord Beat Festival
Fri, Jul 17, Dour, BE - Dour Festival
Sat, Jul 18, Park um Belval, LUX -  Flow Festival
Sat, 22 Aug, New York, NY - Location to be Announced 
Sat, 12 Sep, Burlington, VT - Otis Mountain festival
Thu, Oct 15, Tourcoing, FR - Le Grand Mix
Fri, Oct 16, Nancy, FR - Nancy Jazz Pulsation Festival
Thu, Nov 19, Chicago, IL - Sleeping Village

PRE-SAVE POWER HOUSE HERE

LP Artwork Credit: Sophia Perras // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

POWER HOUSE TRACKLIST
01 Welcome Home 
02 SpiceKick 
03 EAT!ME!OUT! 
04 So Smart
05 Thank You!!!
06 WHIP
07 Crawl
08 pixxxie
09 Workout
10 Salt
11 POPSTAR
12 Wtvr

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ELLEN FROESE’ NEW LP OUT TODAY, SHARES NEW VIDEO

ELLEN FROESE’ NEW ALBUM, SOLITARY SONGS, OUT TODAY VIA VICTORY POOL RECORDS

WATCH / SHARE “TIDE POOL” HERE

WESTERN CANADIAN TOUR DATES BEGIN JUNE 13

BUY / STREAM SOLITARY SONGS HERE

Photo Credit : Little Jack Films // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, Saskatoon songsmith Ellen Froese releases her new album, Solitary Songs, via Victory Pool Records. To mark the occasion, she’s also sharing the new video for album track, “Tide Pool”, an “ode to my cat, a dear friend to me during a turbulent time in my life, whose own life lasted only a year and a bit,” explains Froese. “It's strange how timing works; we got each other through to greener pastures (albeit different kinds), and I wanted to thank him in a song. I love when the band kicks in, and I love the video Stephanie Kuse made. Both make me cry, imagining my little buddy by a babbling brook, chasing butterflies and chewing grass in the sun.”

WATCH / SHARE “TIDE POOL” HERE

MORE ABOUT SOLITARY SONGS
Solitary Songs finds Ellen Froese meditating on a strange chapter of her life. “It’s been a weird year—lots of life changes, maybe some ego-death,” she says. Between an ADHD diagnosis and cutting back on some vices, her perspective—as a musician, a lover, a human being—has changed.

The follow up to 2022’s For Each Flower Growing (produced with the Sheepdogs’ Sam Corbett), Solitary Songs showcases Froese singing songs that sound like dusted-off country classics with wry, down-to-earth lyricism. One moment, Froese is confessing, ‘I’m scared of getting old / But more than that, I’m scared of living without your love’; the next, she’s reeling from a false-start fling, ‘stray cattin’ along’ with a freshly purchased ‘strawberry watermelon turbo-powered vape’. There are no sacred cows in Froese’s world, with blunt humour meeting heartache while the band plays on.

WATCH / SHARE “BELLFLOWER BLUE” HERE

“This record is the outcome of facing non-stop anxiety with songwriting,” Froese says. “I was oscillating back and forth between feeling stuck and feeling like, ‘fuck it, I need to zoom out and have some fun.’” This tension makes Solitary Songs captivating; Froese, chastises herself for overcomplicating things, even if it may be for self-preservation, singing ‘don’t look hard, Ellen’. But she does look hard, turning over the complications—the ex-lover, the rough weather, the lonely hotel bed—meditating on her deeper desires; as her honeyed voice sings, ‘what I seek now is a methodology for peacefulness between my heart and mind’.

Breaking down the role ADHD has played in her life, Froese’s fight against “the damn dopamine hunt” is tracked across Solitary Songs. “If something is intriguing to me, it becomes my entire reality for that time,” Froese explains. Froese excels at self-deprecatingly depicting her own fixations (she muses at one point, ‘I’m thinkin’ and I’m drinkin’ up ways to make you mine’).

LISTEN / SHARE “WINDY WAS THE WEATHER” HERE
LISTEN / SHARE “PRACTICING MY WINK” HERE

Album highlight “Windy Was The Weather” finds Froese tossed and turned by the fickleness of connection. Over bittersweet strums, Froese recalls a tryst with a ‘siren of beauty’. Exhibiting a wisdom far beyond her years, Froese laments the volatility of our bodies and minds, with the caveat that there is some pleasure in the uncertainty of ‘a rose, both thorny and soft on my neck’. Whipping up a gust of strings and horns, this stirring waltz feels as timeless as autumn itself.

WATCH / SHARE “SOLITARY SONG” HERE
LISTEN / SHARE “WONDERING WHEN?” HERE

Friendship is at the heart of Solitary Songs, which sounds like how it was made: a big hangout with friends, trying to make one another smile. Recorded at RecHall studios in Saskatoon, Solitary Songs was created through jubilant, off-the-cuff collaboration, with the band riffing arrangements while Froese penned new verses in the control room.

At this point in her career, with 4 full-length albums and many international tours under her belt, Solitary Songs showcases Froese digging for the feeling of “just making music for the joy of it, like when I was a kid.” And as far as quitting the dopamine rush and finding self-acceptance goes? “I guess the journey up to wellness has peaks and valleys, but it does start to level out,” Froese muses. Indeed, Solitary Songs sees Froese’ flirting with self-acceptance while figuring things out; trying to be “happy in the confidence of a solitary song,” and getting your friends on board for some cheeky country-folk tunes. And nobody does those quite like Ellen Froese.

BUY / STREAM SOLITARY SONGS HERE

TOUR DATES
Jun 13 - Lethbridge, AB - The Owl
Jun 14 - Penticton, BC - The Hub
Jun 17 - Kelowna, BC - DunnEnzies
Jun 18 - Vancouver, BC - The Heatley
Jun 19 - Nanaimo, BC - The Globe Theatre
Jun 25 - Edmonton, AB - The Aviary
Jun 26 - Regina, SK - The Artesian
Jun 27 - Saskatoon, SK - Amigos

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SOLITARY SONGS TRACKLIST
01 Solitary Song
02 Wondering When
03 Don’t Look Hard
04 Windy Was The Weather
05 Practicing My Wink
06 Tide Pool
07 Bellflower Blue
08 Closed Game
09 Living Without Your Love
10 Solitary Song (Slow Version)
11 Lucille Mulhall

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BYE PARULA RELEASES THEIR NEW SINGLE “QUAND VIENT LE SOIR”

WATCH / SHARE “QUAND VIENT LE SOIR” HERE
BUY / STREAM “QUAND VIENT LE SOIR” HERE

NEW ALBUM SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING OUT JUNE 5 VIA SECRET CITY RECORDS

ALBUM LAUNCH SHOW JUNE 11 AT SALA ROSSA IN MONTREAL
TICKETS ON SALE HERE

SUMMER FESTIVAL DATES NOW ANNOUNCED 

PRE-SAVE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING HERE

“A blistering, ultra‑danceable single (KISSBURN)” – Radio France "ICI Occitanie"

Photo Credit: Marc-André Dupaul // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Montreal trio Bye Parula share their atmospheric, velvety new single “Quand vient le soir,” the third from their new album Something Out Of Nothing, out June 5 via Secret City Records. Performed entirely in French, the native language of singer and bassist Loïc Calatayud-Sola, the track is enhanced by the vocal contribution of Adèle Trottier-Rivard of Bibi Club. 

Produced by Calatayud-Sola himself, the music video features Robbie Kuster, who also produced the album. “Quand vient le soir” thus reveals itself as “a nostalgic love song,” says Calatayud-Sola. “It feels like a letter you’d write to someone you once loved but never send—the kind of message that only feels right for a couple of minutes at night, maybe after a drink or a high, just before sleep,” he explains further. "My native language is French, even though I never really listened to music in French. But when I moved to Quebec, I felt it was important to try singing in that language. — I listened to older French singers, but I never listened to contemporary pop in French. Then I discovered Karkwa; to me, it was kind of like Grizzly Bear in French. And I thought to myself: ‘Wow, it’s crazy that this exists! OK, I could listen to this.’ My perspective started to change—I heard Klô Pelgag and lots of other awesome projects that really inspired me. So for this song, I thought to myself, ‘OK, I think I have something that makes sense and works in French, and it would be great to have that kind of Air/Gainsbourg vibe.’”

WATCH / SHARE “QUAND VIENT LE SOIR” HERE
BUY / STREAM “QUAND VIENT LE SOIR” HERE

“Quand vient le soir” follows thematically-linked, dancefloor-ready additional album singles “KISSBURN” and “I Don’t Know”, and shows a different side to the rising band—Calatayud-Sola, guitarist Sebastián Riquelme, and drummer Sergio D'Isanto. Produced by Kuster and mixed by Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), Something Out Of Nothing features a team of collaborators, including Inuk singer/songwriter Elisapie, Bibi Club’s Adèle Trottier-Rivard, Morgan Moore and Karkwa keyboardist François Lafontaine. 

Bye Parula is set to perform at multiple Canadian festivals this summer—including Northern Lights (Sudbury, ON), FEQ (Quebec City, QC), and Hillside (Guelph, ON). Bye Parula will also celebrate Something Out Of Nothing with a hometown album release show on June 11 at La Sala Rossa.

WATCH / SHARE “I DON’T KNOW” HERE
BUY / STREAM “I DON’T KNOW” HERE

Each weekday morning at around 10am, Bye Parula become the most popular band in Canada—if only for about 20 seconds. That’s when their 2023 single, “Still Got the Spirit”, is broadcast across the country on CBC Radio One as the opening theme to the network’s flagship arts-and-culture talk show, Q with Tom Power. The song’s smooth, supple groove and jabbing disco strings made it an outlier amid the ornate prog-pop vignettes that otherwise filled up their DIY 2023 debut album, I (also produced by Robbie Kuster and mixed by Warren Spicer), and the placement not only exposed these Montreal indie-scene newcomers to a wider national audience, it also catalyzed them to innovate and expand their sound. Where their earliest recordings captured a group of newly acquainted players still getting to know each other through musical communication, Something Out of Nothing is a testament to their deepening friendships and increasingly intuitive interplay. The result is Something Out Of Nothing: a mercurial mix that draws from the orchestral groove of Serge Gainsbourg, the wounded melodies of Elliott Smith, the cosmopolitan rhythms of the Talking Heads, and the artisanal R&B of Dijon, all imbued with a 1970s cinematic sensibility that blurs the line between sunny, fuzzy fantasy and urbane sophistication. 

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

Something Out of Nothing is divided into two parts for the listener’s experience: ‘Songs to Listen to in a Standing Position’ and ‘Songs to Listen to in a Sitting Position.’ Two atmospheres that seem diametrically opposed yet are ultimately and intimately connected. Whether racing through the night or settling into dawn’s light, each track is woven from the same thread: love made alive by care. In this way, the album unfolds as a complete story. Its standing-position songs celebrate how love moves us, while its sitting-position songs reveal how love holds us. Together, they remind us of the necessity of both movement and stillness, of brightness and depth embracing the joy that lifts us and the pain that grounds us. Urging us to dance. Urging us to pause.

PRE-SAVE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING HERE

BYE PARULA LIVE
06/02 - London, UK - The Lower Third (Upstairs) - tickets
06/03 - Paris, FR - Metaxu Pantin
06/04 - Berlin, DE - Rough Trade
06/11 - Montreal, QC - Sala Rossa (LP release Show)
07/10-12 - Sudbury, ON - Northern Lights Festival
07/17 - Quebec City, QC - FEQ
07/18-19 - Guelph, ON - Hillside Festival

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SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING TRACKLIST
Side A - Songs to Listen to in a Standing Position
01 I don’t know
02 KISSBURN
03 I’m getting ready
04 Something Out Of Nothing
05 Home

Side B - Songs to Listen to in a Sitting Position
06 Orange Blossom (There’s a million reasons)
07 Miedo de olvidar (featuring Elisapie)
08 Quand vient le soir
09 Needed
10 Burning down the house

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