Royal Mounta

Sister Ray: Communion [Vinyl LP]

Last summer a few friends from some of Canada's most notable bands - Dave Monks (Tokyo Police Club), Sam Roberts (Sam Roberts Band), Menno Versteeg (Hollerado), and Chris Murphy (Sloan) - got together to write some songs. They mostly made dad jokes but also jammed on a bunch of 3 chord songs they all had lying around. They recorded a bunch of stuff in a few days and over the year added some ideas here and there and all of a sudden a year had past and they realized they kinda had an album so they said let's name ourselves the first thing they thought of and release it. Anyway, they're called Anyway Gang

Calpurnia: Scout [Vinyl LP]

Over the course of ten groove-heavy songs, Islomania flits from the ridiculous to the sublime. On the surface, these songs are all blissful hedonism, tracing the reckless abandon of a progressively wild Friday night. But pick at the scab and there's a darkness. Themes of futility and repetition ("Closed Captioning"), a yearning for transcendence ("Natural Law Party"), a need for understanding ("A Passionate Age") and a deep desire for vulnerability and intimacy ("We Like to Do it With the Lights On") thread the album. "Tension and release exist throughout. Every song here begins bottled up, but there's always a cathartic release by the end. There's darkness and doubt in every crevice of this record, but there's always a release," Nick Thorburn says.

Wild Pink: A Billion Little Lights (Light Blue) [Vinyl LP]

Wild Pink: A Billion Little Lights (Blue Jay) [Vinyl LP]

The fourth full-length from Wild Pink, ILYSM unfolds with all the fractured beauty of a dreamscape. Over the course of 12 chameleonic tracks, the New York-bred rock band build another world inhabited by ghosts and angels and aliens, inciting a strange and lovely daze as the backdrop shifts from the mundane (subdivisions, highways, hotel parking lots) to the extraordinary (deserts, battlefields, the moon). But within its vast imagination lies a potent truth-telling on the part of singer/guitarist John Ross, whose lyrics closely examine his recent struggle with cancer. The follow-up to 2021's A Billion Little Lights-a critically acclaimed effort praised by the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, Vulture, and Stereogum, who named it "one of the prettiest rock records of the past decade"-ILYSM emerges as a truly revelatory body of work, transforming the most painful reflection into moments of transcendence.