Most of us have, at some low ebb, sought comfort in the misfortunes of strangers. Nikkole Stone, the Toronto singer-songwriter who is Dynasty Four, did it with unusual thoroughness: all twenty seasons of *Hell's Kitchen* in two months, a sustained act of self-medication by shouting. Where others would have emerged with a sourdough starter and a vague sense of shame, Stone emerged with a single, and a very good one.

Rock and roll has a habit of attracting people who want to talk about it more than play it. Pennan Brae, a Vancouver singer-songwriter who writes his own songs and scores independent films, belongs to the other camp. *Studio*, his latest album, is a record made by someone who has spent a great deal of time in a room with amplifiers and wants you to hear what happens when they are switched on.

Dawn is rock music's oldest trick, and the genre has been squinting into it since the first amplifier warmed up. Canadian singer-songwriter JF Roy, born in Atlantic Canada and now settled in Alberta, takes it on with "The Morning Light". He does so with a lack of irony that is almost radical, and the result is a rousing, big-hearted record that leaves a rather better mood behind than most of its more fashionable neighbours.

There's a particular kind of song that arrives not with a bang but with the quiet click of a door closing on something irretrievable, and "Deux Moitiés" is exactly that kind of song. Nairolf — the French-born, Ontario-transplanted multi-instrumentalist who has spent three albums quietly building a case for himself as one of the more thoughtful voices in the post-grunge diaspora — has done something genuinely disarming here: he's gone soft, and in doing so, gone deeper.

Three minutes and eleven seconds: that is the whole of the ask, and Winnipeg's CAR287 spend every one of them as though the bar were closing and the jukebox had one coin left. Among streaming-age running times that bloat and songs that outstay their welcome, "End Of The Day" amounts to a public service.

Most Civil War songs end where the bugles stop. Foxy Leopard starts there. "Children of the War," the flagship single from the forthcoming album *After*, arrives once the armies have gone home, the flags are folded and the speeches made, and it turns its gaze on the people those speeches forgot. It is a song about the long afterwards, and it may be the finest thing this Quebec project has yet put its name to.

Toronto has quietly become one of pop's great incubators, and Kylo's "Nimble" is the sound of an artist stepping out of the machine and into the room. Where her earlier material leaned on synthesised gloss, this single strips the wiring out entirely and leaves her alone with a guitar, a voice that cracks exactly when it needs to, and a heartbreak too fresh to have been tidied up for public consumption. It is a bold pivot, the kind that could easily have gone soft and beige in lesser hands. Instead, Kylo has made something that sounds lived-in rather than styled.

Rock and roll doesn't need reinventing this year — not when a BC guitar man with two decades of mileage under his belt can plug in, count off, and remind everyone why the format never needed fixing in the first place. *Living the Dream Right Now* is Steve Montgomery's ninth studio outing under the SkipRock Music banner, and it lands like a bar-room encore: sweaty, grinning, and utterly unbothered by fashion.

Trois-Rivières isn't exactly punk rock's ancestral home, but Jim Giguère and his band of scarred romantics have spent a decade proving that geography means nothing when the songs are honest enough. *A New Frame of Mind* arrives not as a victory lap but as a confession booth with a Marshall stack bolted to the door, and it's the finest thing this outfit has committed to tape.

Pop songs about happiness are notoriously difficult to pull off. Misery hands a songwriter automatic gravitas; contentment forces them to earn the listener's attention through craft alone, with no shortcut through shared wreckage. JF Roy, a Canadian singer-songwriter better known until now for rock built on faith and struggle, has wandered into this trickier territory with "Sundress," and come out the other side with something genuinely disarming: a love song that refuses to manufacture conflict it doesn't feel.