TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL’S DEBUT LP OUT TODAY, SHARE NEW VIDEO

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

WATCH / SHARE “EAST OF ANYTHING” HERE

TOUR DATES CONTINUE SEPTEMBER 15 | FULL DATES LISTED BELOW
TICKETS ON SALE HERE

BUY / STREAM ANGEL SO BAD HERE

LISTEN TO TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL’S INTERVIEW
WITH TOM POWER ON CBC Q HERE

“True Mountain Laurel make a strong case that we just need to get our friends together and do some vivacious yapping, set it to a dusty, forlornly hopeful folk tune and rise, together.” - Exclaim!

“For Blais and Lynch, playfulness isn’t an escape from sincerity but another way of accessing it, allowing the record to have fun while still engaging thoughtfully with the traditions of folk music…Rather than pulling from the wells of brutal emotionality that typically inform their solo projects, the friends leaned into folk traditions of fiction and storytelling, returning to the music they listened to as kids.” - RANGE

“Both Vancouver musicians are experts in smart indie rock that sounds extremely sweet while the lyrics cut deep. That’s true in their partnership, True Mountain Laurel, as well.”
- The Georgia Straight

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 formed the supergroup True Mountain Laurel. Today, they release their debut record, Angel So Bad. A tender, dust-swept exploration of all the feelings that fall through the cracks, the record is equal parts folk reverie and country yearning, while 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.

Accompanying the album today is the new video for “East of Anything”, a song that was written as an act of persistence in the face of creative exhaustion and lives in a midnight room where memory, loneliness, drunkenness, and comfort all start to bleed into one another. The song is a steady flame in the face of emotional dislocation; something to focus your eyes on when you’re feeling slightly outside of reality, outside of clarity, outside of where you thought you were meant to be; east of anything. 

“East Of Anything” was “our first whack at co-writing together,” explains Haley and Sam. “This song sat in such a magical middle place between each of our songwriting and musical tendencies. We silently danced around the subject of who would ‘get the song’ for a little while before we realized it belonged exactly where it was; that was the inception of True Mountain Laurel.”

WATCH / SHARE “EAST OF ANYTHING” HERE

MORE ABOUT ANGEL SO BAD + TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL
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.

WATCH / SHARE “ANGEL SO BAD” HERE

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.

LISTEN / SHARE “HOLY HELL” HERE
WATCH / SHARE “HOLY HELL” LIVE PERFORMANCE VIDEO HERE

LISTEN TO TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL’S INTERVIEW
WITH TOM POWER ON CBC Q HERE

TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL TOUR DATES
9/15/2026 Emmanuel United Church, Waterloo, ON
9/16/2026 Mills Hardware, Hamilton, ON
9/17/2026 Harmony Hall, Gormley, ON
9/19/2026 4th Stage NAC, Ottawa, ON
9/20/2026 Knox Hall, Sudbury, ON
9/22/2026 Hugh's Room, Toronto, ON
9/24/2026 Pop Montreal - Le Ministere, Montreal, QC
9/28/2026 The Carleton, Halifax, NS
9/29/2026 Trailside, Charlottetown, PEI
9/30/2026 The Cap, Fredericton, NB
10/2/2026 Frolic and Folk Pub, Iona, NS
11/3/2026 Modern Love, Calgary, AB
11/4/2026 The Artesian, Regina, SK
11/5/2026 Side Stage, Winnipeg, MB
11/6/2026 Amigos, Saskatoon, SK
11/7/2026 Double Dragon, Edmonton, AB
11/8/2026 Communitea Café, Canmore, BC
11/10/2026 The Old Fire Hall Tavern, Rossland, BC
11/11/2026 The Hub on Martin, Penticton, BC
11/12/2026 Mel Lehan Hall at St. James Square, Vancouver, BC

BUY / STREAM ANGEL SO BAD HERE

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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 NEW ALBUM OUT TODAY, SHARE NEW VIDEO

SUMMERSETS NEW ALBUM, PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW, OUT TODAY

WATCH / SHARE “PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW” HERE

NOMINATED FOR AN ONTARIO FOLK MUSIC AWARD,
RECORDING ARTIST OF THE YEAR

FALL TOUR DATES BEGIN THIS OCTOBER

BUY / STREAM PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PURCHASE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW VINYL HERE

“Pine Trees In A Perfect Row” Video Still

Today, summersets, the duo of Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka, release their new album, Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, an album that 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.

The album arrives with a video for the title track, “Pine Trees In A Perfect Row”, of which Mattson says: "Portrayals of small town Canada in modern popular music are extremely few and far between, especially compared to our American counterparts who have made entire genres and industries out of mythologizing the American small town. With this album (and song) I wanted to write openly and specifically about who I am and where I’m from, and to actually have all these hyper-local locations, cultural signifiers, common phrases explicitly mentioned and recorded, as this has seldom been done previously. ‘Pine Trees…’ really caps off the album with the narrator driving back through Northern Ontario sort of resigned to the fact that we never really leave our hometown."

WATCH / SHARE “PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW” 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
WATCH / SHARE “LOVE LIKE YOU” 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
WATCH / SHARE “CANADA” 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

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.”

BUY / STREAM PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PURCHASE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW VINYL HERE

PERFORMANCE DATES
Oct 10 - Ottawa, ON - NAC
Oct 23 - Toronto, ON - Burdock Music Hall
Oct 24 - Sault Ste. Marie, ON - The Loft

DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

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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EMMA WORLEY SHARES NEW SINGLE FROM FOREVER BEGINNER, OUT NEXT MONTH

EMMA WORLEY’S NEW ALBUM, FOREVER BEGINNER, OUT SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 VIA ACRONYM RECORDS

LISTEN / SHARE “HARDWARE STORE IN HEAVEN” HERE
BUY / STREAM “HARDWARE STORE IN HEAVEN” HERE

CANADIAN TOUR DATES BEGIN SEPTEMBER 15

Photo Credit : Laura-Lynn Petrick // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Next month, Emma Worley will release her sophomore album, Forever Beginner, an album that tucks grief, joy, humour, and pain into the same fold. Blending alternative folk and Americana, the album was crafted over two years with producer, multi-instrumentalist, and longtime collaborator Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station, Joan Shelley). Emerging during a transformative period in her life, one shaped by chronic illness, treatment, healing, and resilience, Forever Beginner is an open-hearted, self-reckoning body of work.

Today, she shares the new single, “Hardware Store In Heaven”. “I have a special love for hardware stores and find it comforting to be somewhere that so many problems can be solved,” says Worley. “I like wandering the aisles, pondering what I might fix. This song imagines ‘heaven’ as a place where nobody is in a hurry, forgiveness comes easy and the things that matter most are simple. It’s a funny, slightly irreverent take on the afterlife, but underneath it is a pretty sincere wish for another chance to be with the people we love.”

LISTEN / SHARE “HARDWARE STORE IN HEAVEN” HERE
BUY / STREAM “HARDWARE STORE IN HEAVEN” HERE

DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

MORE ABOUT FOREVER BEGINNER
What feels old and new at the same time, Forever Beginner is a folk-ish, country-ish, americana-ish record featuring an ensemble of incredible players and a songwriter who has found her voice. Worley is an artist with a keen sensitivity to the denseness of reality and the ability to write in a way that can feel intensely profound yet simple. The album’s title represents a restructuring of internalized expectations of oneself. In Worley’s words, “it’s a kind of self-acceptance through being open and detached. We are forever emerging and always becoming more of who we are.” Tucking grief, joy, humour, and pain into the same fold, the songs on Forever Beginner have a peculiar openness and self-awareness to them that echo the album's thesis. 

Making Forever Beginner began with a core band of Ben Whiteley on bass, Jasper Smith on guitar, and Julian Psihogios on drums, amid a classic humid Toronto summer in Whiteley’s garage-converted-studio. These initial sessions had a loose and collaborative atmosphere, steered by a group of great players and friends supporting Worley’s songs. Speaking with Jasper Smith, it is obvious that Emma has quietly earned a deep respect from her peers; “Emma has a clear, intuitive understanding of classic song form. Every new song I hear tears me down and rebuilds me again. Crushingly beautiful.” 

WATCH / SHARE “COMEDY CLUB” HERE
BUY / STREAM “COMEDY CLUB” HERE

After laying the bedtracks, the studio became a revolving door of friends and touring musicians dropping in to contribute. Georgia Harmer recorded vocals for “Comedy Club” between her own sessions with Whiteley, and Wyatt C. Louis stopped by while on tour to layer in some more harmonies. Will Kidman added his signature voice on “Hardware Store in Heaven” and “the song in my heart is a hard one to play”. Friends Lia Pappas-Kemps and Dylan Burchell floated in and out, each adding their distinct vocal textures. Supporting these vocal melodies and grounding the record’s folk-Americana sound are the additions of Matt Kelly (pedal steel), Tamara Lindeman (piano), Ken Whiteley (organ), and Kendal Carson (fiddle). 

The record-making process was a light thing during a heavy time for Emma. She had spent the past few years travelling back and forth to Europe to receive treatment for a health condition not available in Canada. The medical support she received was life-changing, though it was also emotionally and mentally demanding. Prioritizing her health meant placing her life, career, and artistic ambitions on hold and accepting a long process of healing. However, creating Forever Beginner would become a way for Worley to reframe her feelings of falling behind. “I’ve spent most of my life being hard on myself,” says Worley. “I’m finally learning to soften into my own nature, and songs are a place I’ve always gotten to do that.” 

WATCH / SHARE “WEEKEND BABY” HERE
BUY / STREAM “WEEKEND BABY” HERE

And while the record is not a concept album, its theme of self-reckoning and re-emergence can be felt on the album’s final track “Known”, where Worley offers a reflection on time, utility, and the fragile nature of belonging. Recorded sparsely, just Emma’s voice and piano gently supported by pedal steel, organ and bass, the song follows the life of a piano, from its beginnings as a felled tree to being turned into an instrument that would affect the lives of so many, only to eventually become ‘dead weight / a burden to move / a burden to tune’. The lyrics draw a parallel to how quickly our own foundations can fall away. It captures the disorientation of realizing a person or place or situation is no longer what it was, and finding yourself in the silence of this change: ‘now I’m nowhere / feeling nothing / feeling known by no one’. 

It is perhaps within this ‘nowhere’ that the essence of Forever Beginner emerges, reminding us that to be human is to be perpetually unfinished. It invites us to keep learning, keep failing, and to find hope in remaining a beginner, forever.

WATCH / SHARE “BUDDY” LYRIC VIDEO
BUY / STREAM “BUDDY” HERE

EMMA WORLEY PERFORMANCE DATES
Sept 15 - Quai des Brumes, Montreal, QC  *
Sept 17 - Charlotte Arts Centre, Fredericton, NB *
Sept 18 - Harvest Moon Festival, Bridgewater, NS * 
Sept 19 - Babas Lounge, Charlottetown, PEI *
Sept 20 - House Show, Halifax, NS * 
Sept 22 - Commune, Truro, NS - *
Sept 23 - Greenslades, Sackville, NB *
* with Talel McBriar and Claire Hunter

Album Cover Artwork by Elycia SFA // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

FOREVER BEGINNER TRACKLIST
01 Weekend Baby
02 Comedy Club
03 Hardware Store in Heaven
04 All For Nothing
05 Buddy
06 Forever Beginner
07 the song in my heart is a hard one to play
08 Cupid The Vandal
09 Known

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