TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL SHARES VIDEO FOR “SUNNY”, TOUR DATES CONTINUE THIS WEEK

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

WATCH / SHARE “SUNNY” HERE

TOUR DATES CONTINUE THIS WEEK | 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

This week, the ‘supergroup’ of Haley Blais and Sam Lynch, True Mountain Laurel, continue on tour with stops all throughout Canada, from Charlottetown to Vancouver. Full tour dates and tickets can be found below. Today they shared the new video for “Sunny” from their new album, Angel So Bad, out via Birthday Cake Records.

“‘Sunny’, and the ethos of this band, is about letting your hair down and feeling free,” says Blais and Lynch. “And what’s more freeing than doing donuts in a dune buggy in Spokane with a stranger?

WATCH / SHARE “SUNNY” HERE

MORE ABOUT ANGEL SO BAD + TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL
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.

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
WATCH / SHARE “EAST OF ANYTHING” 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
9/16/2026 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

2/2/2027 EKKO, Utrecht, NL
2/3/2027 POPUP!, Paris, FR
2/5/2027 The Glad Cafe C.I.C, Glasgow, UK
2/6/2027 Headrow House, Leeds, UK
2/7/2027 QUARRY, Liverpool, UK
2/9/2027 Gullivers, Manchester, UK
2/10/2027 The Louisiana, Bristol, UK
2/11/2027 St Pancras Old Church, London, UK
2/14/2017 The Grand Social, Dublin, IE

BUY / STREAM ANGEL SO BAD HERE

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GHOSTKEEPER SHARE TWO NEW SINGLES FROM UPCOMING LP

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

LISTEN / SHARE “I WANT LOVE”
LISTEN / SHARE “LOVE AND FREE WILL”

BUY / STREAM BOTH SINGLES 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

Today, Ghostkeeper are sharing two more singles off their upcoming album, Balloon Moon, due out October 27, 2026 via Victory Pool Records. 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. 

Of the two new singles, “I Want Love” and “Love and Free Will”, the band says: “It is a journey of self-exploration: A journey to the deepest crevices of my soul to make sense of myself and my relationship with creation - a journey of Love and quantum entanglement. I remember when you were a nebula; busy with astronomical creations. I was a photon. You somehow noticed me - a lonely, microscopic dot of light wandering aimlessly through space - I was expelled from my home in a violent supernova. You blew a charismatic and alluring kiss. A gravitational wave.”

LISTEN / SHARE “I WANT LOVE”
LISTEN / SHARE “LOVE AND FREE WILL”

BUY / STREAM BOTH SINGLES HERE

MORE ABOUT BALLOON MOON
The latest offering from celebrated Métis pop experimentalists Ghostkeeper is their seventh album since emerging onto the scene nearly 20 years ago. 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. 

“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. 

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

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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BODYWASH ANNOUNCES UPCOMING LP, SHARES NEW SINGLE, “LAPSANG”

BODYWASH, THE MONTREAL DUO OF ROSIE LONG DECTER AND CHRIS STEWARD, ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM, LAUGHING AT NOISE,
OUT NOVEMBER 20, 2026 VIA LIGHT ORGAN RECORDS

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

PRE-ORDER LAUGHING AT NOISE VINYL HERE

Photo Credit : Sasha Khalimonova // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

‘Guess I’m turning in / Into someone you can hold / Melt me down in your mold / There’s no turning back from that,’ sings Chris Steward, opening Bodywash’s upcoming album Laughing at Noise, out November 20, 2026 from Light Organ Records. The third LP from the Montreal duo is concerned with the twinned truths of stasis and change, as Steward and songwriting partner Rosie Long Decter take stock of the ambivalent feelings that have gathered behind them over a decade of making music. The duo, who started playing together in a dorm room practice space at university, are now in their early thirties. In that time, the city that nurtured their creative expression has become a markedly harsher place. Rents rise as brownfields are refashioned into real estate; DIY spaces wither in structural shadow; summer is hazier and heavier. How are we supposed to make a living, let alone build a life?

Today, they share the new album single, “Lapsang”, which is “an ode to Montreal's Little Italy neighborhood and the years I spent there, waiting for the 55 bus,” explains Steward. “It's named after my favourite, impossibly smokey blend of tea, which has the most sing-song of names: Lapsang Souchong. The riff and verse were written during an ice storm, where the resulting power outage forced me to write most of the song without a computer. The frozen tree tendrils looked a lot like the leaves of the tea I was brewing, prompting a working title that would never be changed. Later, Rosie and I would record separate melodies for the chorus in the studio, only to realise they could be woven together seamlessly.”

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

MORE ABOUT LAUGHING AT NOISE
Laughing at Noise doesn’t indulge nostalgia or cynicism—rather, it sees Long Decter and Steward sorting through what it means to grow older and keep on with both wariness and wisdom. The duo’s previous LP, I Held the Shape While I Could, was swirling, elegant, elastic. As they began writing songs for what would come next, both Long Decter and Steward found themselves pulled toward a more stripped-back approach to songcraft. Steward was enamoured with acoustic guitar, and Long Decter was writing on guitar and bass rather than on keys. The songs that became Laughing at Noise are playful and worn-in, and the sound of the record follows suit. The album is rougher around the edges than previous Bodywash releases, trading an adherence to fidelity for a looser, noisier sound that developed over months of experimentation. 

The duo produced the record over the course of a year at Autoland Audio in Montreal’s Parc-Ex neighbourhood, where they’d previously worked on their debut LP, 2019’s Comforter, and brought in Asher Gould-Murtagh (Shirley Hurt, Mother Tongues) for mixing duties. The new LP inherits a palette of shoegaze and dream pop that’s been present since the beginning of Bodywash, but it also rhymes with a scrappier 90s indie rock sensibility in tone and point of view: you can hear it in the squall that ends “Widows’ Peak”, in the chiming guitar refrain motoring “Come and Go”, and in the down-tuned strum under “Pinup”. Laughing at Noise dials up the distortion and plugs into a genealogy of artists like Elliott Smith and Kim Gordon who chronicle modernity’s malaise.

WATCH / SHARE “COME AND GO” HERE
BUY / STREAM “COME AND GO” HERE

Still, there are details that situate these songs in a particular slantwise, Montreal perspective—a point of view that, along with the record’s melodic pleasures, buoys it from world-weariness. On the dreamy single “Lapsang”, Steward sings, ‘I took the bus down the bike lane’—a snowglobe image of the city’s charming, unruly frustrations—before reflecting ‘I’ve lived around here for a long time’. On closing track “Overpass”, Long Decter observes that the ‘sun rises in the south in my city,’ which might sound nonsensical if it weren’t so familiar to those who’ve navigated Montreal’s askew grid. These details punctuate songs that move with a patient sense for story.

Long Decter says that she might call Laughing at Noise the band’s “Montreal album.” The record embodies the sort of perspective on home that can only come with time. Steward echoes this idea: “The longer you stay somewhere, the more you become the yardstick against which everything is measured,” he says. Laughing at Noise finds the duo in tight form, working through these intimate, uneasy feelings of distance. As the lead guitar and drums pull back from “Overpass” one last time, Long Decter ties up the song’s birds-eye reflections with a line that lands like a stone: ‘Sometimes I am older / Sometimes we’re the same’.

Bio by Brennan McCracken

MORE ABOUT BODYWASH
Joined on stage by drummer Ryan White, bassist Mike Heinermann and guitarist Micah Flavin, Bodywash have toured North America and the UK, supporting acts like Airiel, Land of Talk and Zoon. Their previous releases have received acclaim from NPR Music, Stereogum, AllMusic, Bandcamp Daily, RANGE, CULT MTL, and elsewhere.

BODYWASH LIVE
Sat. Sept. 19 - Montreal, QC @ Parc Vinet (SeptemberFest)
Fri. Sept. 25 - Toronto, ON @ The Dance Cave (Second Summer Fest) 
Sat. Oct. 10 - Halifax, NS @ The Buffalo Club (NOWADAYS Festival)

PRE-ORDER LAUGHING AT NOISE VINYL HERE

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LAUGHING AT NOISE TRACKLIST
01 Turn In
02 Widow’s Peak
03 Lapsang
04 Come And Go
05 Like A Bell
06 Pinup
07 La Renommée
08 A Sticker That’s Peeling
09 Bliss
10 Overpass

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