TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL ANNOUNCE DEBUT ALBUM, SHARE NEW SINGLE

TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL, THE ‘SUPERGROUP’ OF HALEY BLAIS AND SAM LYNCH, ANNOUNCE THEIR DEBUT ALBUM, ANGEL SO BAD, OUT AUGUST 28, 2026 VIA BIRTHDAY CAKE RECORDS

BUY / STREAM “ANGEL SO BAD” HERE
LISTEN / SHARE “ANGEL SO BAD” HERE

PRE-SAVE ANGEL SO BAD HERE

Photo Credit : Mikaela Kautzky // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Born out of late-night harmonies, shared voice memos, and a long-standing friendship rooted in mutual admiration, Haley Blais and Sam Lynch have formed the supergroup True Mountain Laurel. Their debut collection of songs, Angel So Bad, is a tender, dust-swept exploration of all the feelings that fall through the cracks. Equal parts folk reverie and country yearning, the project pulls from their respective solo careers. Sam’s poetic introspection and Haley’s razor-sharp lyrical intimacy blend into something softer, stranger, and wholly their own.

What began as casual writing sessions in between Sam and Haley’s respective tour cycles has slowly transformed into a collaborative ritual: trading lines and melodies over coffee and recording scrappy voice note demos at the end of the day. The songs emerged not from pressure or plan but from a desire to make music the way they first fell in love with it — no clocks, no ego, just two voices in a room.

The album’s title track, “Angel So Bad”, is an ode to the moral trials associated with that oldest of human hobbies: gossiping. Often put down as at best idle talk and at worst a social danger, "Angel So Bad" asks us to consider its magical properties, its role in community building, its function as a catalyst for human connection.

“When we finished writing ‘Angel So Bad’, I could tell it was going to be the inspiration for the world of the project and the rest of the songwriting process,” says Blais. “It’s tongue in cheek but earnest; it crosses its fingers while it tells the truth.”

“Although it wasn’t the first song we wrote together, ‘Angel So Bad’ felt like the true starting point of whatever this project was meant to be,” explains Lynch. “The song started as a conversation about gossip, and slowly turned into a cheeky exploration about how exhausting it can feel to constantly try to be a perfectly good person all the time.”

BUY / STREAM “ANGEL SO BAD” HERE
LISTEN / SHARE “ANGEL SO BAD” HERE

MORE ABOUT TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL
Influenced by artists like Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, and early 2000s Canadian singer-songwriters, the project is less about genre and more about feel. Acoustic guitars, brushed drums, pedal steel, and the occasional jangly piano support lyrics that feel diaristic without being confessional: capturing the ache of growing older, the strangeness of still wanting more, and the joy of finding home in another person’s voice.

There’s a looseness to these songs that feels intentional. Where Sam’s solo work leans cinematic and atmospheric, and Haley’s leans into the clever and orchestral, here they meet in the middle: warm, minimal, and a little bit rough around the edges. Live, the project takes on an even more intimate form without setlists or rigid arrangements. Just two friends singing the truth as they feel it that night.

PRE-SAVE ANGEL SO BAD HERE

PERFORMANCE DATES
Jun 9 - Toronto, ON | The Mod Club w/ Trousdale
Aug 2 - Comox, BC | Filberg Festival

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ANGEL SO BAD TRACKLIST

01 Angel So Bad
02 Holy Hell
03 Bird Of Prey
04 East Of Anything
05 Sunny
06 I Love You, Nicole
07 Angel Reprise
08 The Trial

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SUMMERSETS ANNOUNCES UPCOMING LP, SHARE NEW SINGLE

SUMMERSETS ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM, PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW, OUT AUGUST 28, 2026

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

MORE TOUR DATES ADDED FOR FALL BEGINNING IN OCTOBER

PRE-SAVE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PRE-ORDER PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE

Photo Credit : Cayllan Cassavia // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, summersets, the duo of Kalle Mattson and his childhood friend and long-time bandmate Andrew Sowka, announce their upcoming album, Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, out August 28, 2026. The album was written “to be a (complicated) love letter to Northern Ontario and small town Canadian identity and experience,” explains Mattson. “It's a collection of songs about real Canadian stories, and a character study of a landscape and place that is rarely written about in popular music.” 

Each song on Pine Trees in a Perfect Row is based on versions of real people and stories, a collage of characters from my life from Northern Ontario, serving as a sonic autoethnography intersecting memory, class, and place. “While the album is rooted in the idea of the Canadian small town, it’s not just a 'Canada' record; it's a look at Canadian identity on a personal and specific scale, with the intention of speaking to a (hopefully) universal sentiment: that you never really leave your home,” says Mattson.

Today, summersets is aptly sharing the album’s lead track, titled “Canada”. “Portrayals of small town Canada within popular songs are few and far between, and even fewer examples exist depicting Northern Ontario,” says Mattson. “With ‘Canada’ I was trying to write a song that laid out a lot of the themes and stories we explore on the album. It's a conflicted look at Northern Ontario and Canadian identity and as a whole, with each verse looking at a season, starting in summer and ending in spring.”

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

MORE ABOUT PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW
By Michael Barclay

Like many of their financially pinched generation, Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka of summersets might have to “Move Back Home”. That song, from the harmony-rich Ottawa duo’s second album, Pine Trees In A Perfect Row, is of the timeliest singles of 2026, by acknowledging the affordability crisis in North American cities. As any headline will tell you — but not many songs will — millennials are reckoning with the fact that they’ll be unlikely to afford a home in major urban centres, and are moving back to the small towns they were eager to escape in their youth. (In the case of summersets, that’s the Great Lakes city of Sault Ste. Marie, in Northern Ontario.)

“Move Back Home” was the first song Mattson wrote for Pine Trees, and it gave him a theme to centre the rest around. “So many people I went to high school with moved away from Sault Ste. Marie or somewhere else in northern Ontario, and then in order to move ahead in life they had to move back home: retreat to move forward.” There’s an explicit theme of class consciousness and economic realism absent in so much popular music, even though the times clearly call for it: witness the recent revival of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as a rare example.

WATCH / SHARE “MOVE BACK HOME” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MOVE BACK HOME” HERE

But there’s another timely element of home that runs throughout Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, one that speaks to Mattson’s identity as a Canadian songwriter at a time of considerable North American tension.  That said, the first track is simply titled “Canada”. Says Mattson, “The chorus was just a placeholder, but every three-syllable word I tried never felt right. So let’s own it! There are so few modern songs about Canada. And not in a waving-the-flag way: I’m as conflicted as anyone about where I'm from and how it’s shaped my life and my writing.” The album’s striking artwork is influenced by the Canadian modernist movement of the 1960s, which culminated with Expo 67. 

As a solo artist in the 2010s, Mattson won or was nominated for every major prize in Canada, for his three consecutive albums 2014’s Someday, The Moon Will Be Gold, 2015’s Avalanche and 2018’s Youth.. During pandemic lockdowns in 2020, he formed summersets with Sowka, his childhood friend, to explore Everly Brother harmonies and to alleviate the weight of being a solo artist. Their acclaimed 2023 debut Small Town Story was a narrative concept album, exploring the lives of one couple whose story ends in tragedy.

WATCH / SHARE “MILLION DOLLAR TICKET” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MILLION DOLLAR TICKET” HERE

This time out, Mattson says he didn’t want to write fiction. On Pine Trees, the stories and characters are very real: one song, “Another Year For Free”, has one verse about high school, one about a divorcée, one about his Italian immigrant grandfather who worked at a steel plant, and one about his mother’s cancer. He admits the vignette structure is based in part on Paul Simon’s “Slip Sliding Away”, a song he’s taught in class as a songwriting professor at a Canadian university. 

“Secondhand Skates” tells the story of a childhood friend and hockey teammate who was killed by an allegedly drunk driver at 19, while walking his girlfriend home the night before Canada won Olympic gold in 2010. “All the details in that song are true,” says Mattson. “The driver didn’t brake. There was a cross on the side of the road made out of hockey sticks, and that image always stuck with me. It was really hard to write and not make it feel too on the nose. It was the last song I wrote for the record.” 

WATCH / SHARE “IF YOU WERE A STRANGER” HERE
BUY / STREAM “IF YOU WERE A STRANGER” HERE

The sweet sounds of summersets often mask melancholy and darkness, but there’s one song on Pine Trees that Mattson considers to be “the only true love song I’ve ever written.” ‘If you were a stranger / I would fall in love again / If you were the start / I would stay right until the end.” He explains, “My partner and I grew up together, and have been together most of our adult lives. We have complicated family situations: we both lost our mothers young, don’t have a lot of family — we’re all we got. I wanted to write something that felt like us.”

Pine Trees is a stripped-down acoustic record that sounds like what it is: recorded live off the floor with keyboardist/producer Jim Bryson (Kathleen Edwards, Weakerthans) and Peter Von Althen (Skydiggers) on drums. Only additional guitarist Christine Bougie (Bahamas) and a string section were overdubbed later. That immediacy and intimacy comes through in every note. 

Says Mattson, proudly, “It feels really like I've finally made the record I've wanted to make for a long time.”

PRE-SAVE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PRE-ORDER PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE

PERFORMANCE DATES
Jun 18 - Sudbury, ON - Sudbury Theatre Centre
Jul 12 - Ottawa, ON - Bluesfest w/ The Lumineers and Leif Vollebekk
Oct 10 - Ottawa, ON - TBA
Oct 23 - Toronto, ON - Burdock Music Hall
Oct 24 - Sault Ste. Marie, ON - The Loft

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PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW TRACKLIST
01 Canada
02 Move Back Home
03 Forgetting For The Better
04 If You Were A Stranger
05 Another Year For Free
06 Second Hand Skates
07 Love Like You
08 Million Dollar Ticket
09 Words Worth Writing
10 Somewhere Gone
11 Pine Trees In A Perfect Row

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JEAN-MICHEL BLAIS ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM, MIRADOR

THE MONTREAL PIANIST AND COMPOSER SHARES “ULYSSE” FROM FOURTH ALBUM, OUT SEPTEMBER 25 VIA ARTS & CRAFTS

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

PRE-SAVE MIRADOR HERE

CANADA, EUROPE AND UK TOUR DATES BEGIN THIS FALL

Photo Credit: Adrian Villagomez // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

“The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music?” - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

mirador is the fourth album from Montreal pianist and composer Jean-Michel Blais, set for release on September 25, 2026 via Arts & Crafts. It is Blais’ first release following his critically acclaimed collaborative album with Lara Somogyi, released last year. Announced today alongside new single “ulysse,” the new record finds the Montreal artist turning his gaze onto a wide, wondrous world - exchanging contemporary minimalism for a light and generous maximalism. It is an odyssey that spans choirs, strings and the music of the Andes, from Spanish caves to Estonian forests and all the way back to the basement in Nicolet, Québec, where Blais first imagined adventures. As a musical kid and, even if he wasn't fully aware of these things yet, as a queer person, with Tourette's, Blais' hideaway was his imaginary lookout, his “mirador,” from which he could dream the world.

“What strange place is this where time dissolves, suspended between sky and earth, between the real and the surreal, with no other bearing than the trace of sunlight slipping through a tiny window, slowly tracing its path along a cold white-brick wall,” says Blais. “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. One knocks, one shouts, yet no one comes, save for this dense silence. Until, by chance, by wandering, a door opens from within. a fissure is enough. the desire for an else where still unknown, a will, a direction finally accepted. guilt fades, the troubled mind regains its order. light returns. The sensation of stepping out of a wardrobe, a renewed coming out, and freedom appears, not as promise but as chosen risk, as adventure willingly embraced.”

With more than 375 million streams globally to his name and having played the largest live performances of his career to date, mirador began with Blais reflecting on childhood memories of building imaginary worlds in his parents’ basement. The album’s title references those early “lookout” spaces, places of refuge, invention and possibility. Working with composer and arranger William Brittelle (LA Philharmonic, The National), he had assembled a choir of 12 baroque singers and then added a string quartet of his friends. Blais also enlisted Tulio Velazco Villagra, a master of Andean instruments. Elsewhere residencies at the Arvo Pärt Centre informed the meditative atmosphere. The result is Blais’ most adventurous and transportive work yet, an album that moves fluidly between folk traditions, contemporary composition and cinematic storytelling while holding onto a sense of intimacy throughout.

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

MORE ABOUT JEAN-MICHEL BLAIS
Montreal-based pianist and composer Jean-Michel Blais is signed to Arts & Crafts and Mercury KX (Decca). Since his first album, il, released in 2016 and named one of the 10 best albums of the year by Time Magazine, his music has reached an international audience and accumulated over 375 million streams.

Trained in performance at the conservatory of music, he developed an intimate and expansive musical language on his own, where the piano engages in dialogue with electronic and orchestral textures. A member of the lgbtq+ community and living with Tourette’s syndrome, he also draws on his experience as a social worker to create profoundly human music, driven by sensitivity and emancipation.

His five albums have received critical acclaim, whether in Pitchfork, The Fader or Le Figaro. On stage, he performs solo, in ensembles or with orchestras, in iconic venues such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Southbank Centre in London, as well as in outdoor concerts, notably in front of more than 40,000 spectators at the Montreal International Jazz festival.

A composer for film and television, he won a Cannes Soundtrack Award for his score for Xavier Dolan's film Matthias & Maxime and composed the music for the Wonderfall at Moment Factory installation in Singapore's Changi airport. His music also appears in the Netflix series The Brothers Sun, advertising campaigns for Tudor and Louis Vuitton and during french figure skater Kévin Aymoz's performance at the Milano-Cortina Olympic Games.

PRE-SAVE MIRADOR HERE

JEAN-MICHEL BLAIS PERFORMANCE DATES
TICKETS + MORE INFORMATION HERE

2026
09.24 — Waterloo, QC,  Maison de la culture de Waterloo
09.27 — Ste-Geneviève, QC,  Salle Pauline Julien
10.03 — Val-Morin, QC,  Théâtre du Marais
11.28 — Toronto, ON,  Koerner Hall
10.23 — Berlin, DE. Felt Room
10.26 — London, UK. World Heart Beat
10.27 — Utrecht, NL. Tivoli Vredenburg
10.28 — Paris, FR.La Piccola Scala

2027
01.23 — Nominingue, QC, Espace Saint-Ignace
01.28 — Sainte-Thérèse, QC, Théâtre Lionel Groulx
01.29 — St-Hyacinthe, QC, Centre des arts Juliette Lassonde
01.30 — Baie-du-Febvre, QC,  Théâtre Belcourt
01.31 — Victoriaville, QC, Le Carré 150
02.05 — Shawinigan, QC, Centre des Arts
02.06 — Sherbrooke, QC ,Théâtre Granada
02.07 — Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, QC, Salle Albert Dumouchel
02.10 — Drummondville, QC, Maison des arts Desjardins Drummondville
02.12 — Joliette, QC, Centre Culturel Desjardins
02.13 — Montmagny, QC, Salle Edwin-Bélanger
02.14 — Québec, QC, Grand Théâtre de Québec
02.17 — Brossard, QC, Théâtre Manuvie
02.18 — L'Assomption, QC, Théâtre Hector Charland
02.19 — St-Marie-de-Beauce, QC, Salle Méchatigan
02.20 — Thetford Mines, QC, Salle Dussault
02.21 — Terrebonne, QC, Théâtre du Vieux-Terrebonne
02.25 — Longueuil, QC, Théâtre de la Ville
02.26 — Laval, QC, Salle André-Mathieu
02.27 — St-Eustache, QC, Le Zénith
03.05 — Ottawa, ON, National Arts Centre
04.30 — Vancouver, BC, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
05.20 — Edmundston, NB ,Salle Léo-Poulin
05.21 — Caraquet, NB, Centre Culturel de Caraquet
05.22 — Moncton, NB, Capitol Theatre
05.23 — Fredericton, NB to be announced
10.01 — Bromont, QC, Espace Culturel St-John
10.02 — Châteauguay, QC, Château Scènes
10.03 — Lévis, QC, L’Anglicane
10.07 — St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC, Théâtre des Deux-Rives
10.08 — Montréal (LaSalle), QC, Théâtre Desjardins
10.10 — Gatineau, QC, Salle Odyssée
10.12 — St-Jérôme, QC Théâtre Gilles Vigneault
10.13 — Val-d'Or, QC, Théâtre Télébec
10.14 — Rouyn-Noranda, QC, Théâtre du Cuivre
10.15 — Amos, QC, Théâtre des Eskers
10.20 — Saguenay, QC, Théâtre C
10.21 — Rimouski, QC, Salle de Spectacles Desjardins
10.22 — Carleton-sur-Mer, QC, Studio du Quai des Arts

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mirador TRACKLIST
1. muses
2. ulysse
3. pavane
4. carnavalito
5. mirador
6. quwi
7. granada
8. kyrie
9. laulasmaa
10. silhouettes
11. querelle
12. a chambre des possibles

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