There's a particular breed of British music writer — the kind who cut their teeth queuing outside the Roundhouse and now speaks exclusively in em-dashes and impossible compound adjectives — who would take one look at a red furry dragon fronting a phonk-metal outfit and dismiss it before the needle drops. More fool them. "Rive," the latest transmission from Canadian artist Matt Mars' shape-shifting project MARSUG, is exactly the kind of gloriously unhinged, genre-blind noise that this scene has been crying out for, and it arrives with the swagger of a band that knows precisely what it's doing even as it sounds like it's making it up as it goes. There's something fitting about it too — Canada has long produced musicians with an outsider's fluency in other people's genres, absorbing UK metal, Southern trap, and internet-native phonk alike without ever quite sounding like a tourist in any of them, and MARSUG wears that same borrowed-and-bettered confidence.

Huntsville, Ontario doesn't announce itself as a launchpad for anything resembling a stadium chorus. Cottage country breeds fiddle tunes and campfire harmonies, not synthesizers that glitter like dew on a tent flap at 3 a.m. And yet here comes The Big East, previously nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award — a pedigree that ought to guarantee flannel, not neon — pulling off the trick of sounding simultaneously homesick and interstellar.

Foxy Leopard's *Before* has spent its runtime building a slow, dread-soaked portrait of a nation edging toward catastrophe, told not through generals or statesmen but through the people left to live inside the moment — farmers, shopkeepers, families going about their days while history quietly rearranges itself around them. "We Keep Walkin'" arrives as the record's emotional hinge, and it's a triumph of misdirection. On first listen it sounds like the album's most buoyant, most immediate track — a hooky, foot-tapping Americana number built for singing along. Sit with it a second time, though, and the ground shifts underneath you.

Pop music has always had a soft spot for the uncanny, for the moment a synthesiser sounds almost human, almost alive. Alex Anoussis takes that flirtation and turns it into the entire premise of his new single, handing the microphone over to the machine itself and letting it speak. The gimmick could have curdled into novelty within thirty seconds. It doesn't. Instead, "Hi I'm AI" arrives as one of the more disarming pop statements of the year, a record that treats its high concept with a light touch and a heavier hook.

Foxy Leopard's "Same Old Sermon" is a small masterpiece of restraint — a song that understands the slow erosion of a shared world is far more chilling than any thunderclap of conflict. Pulled from the forthcoming album *Before*, it lands at precisely the right moment in that record's arc: after the warmth of community and labour and courtship has been sketched in, and just as the first hairline cracks begin to show beneath it.

Canada has always been awkward territory for the rock and roll myth. Too polite, people say. Too sensible. And then someone like Bill Wood comes along and makes a complete nonsense of that particular received wisdom.

Raw Soul — the nom de guerre of Vancouver-based hip-hop artist and practicing barrister Rawad — arrives not with a thunderclap but with the measured confidence of a man who has learned, through considerable difficulty, to trust his own counsel. *Still High…*, his nine-track original album released on the 12th of May, is the document of a mind that has survived its own turbulence and chosen, rather defiantly, to be grateful about it. That's a harder emotional register to pull off than most rappers attempt. Gratitude, after all, doesn't sell mixtapes. Raw Soul doesn't appear to care.

Every so often, a record arrives that feels less like a song and more like a manifesto stapled to your front door. *CONTROL*, the new single from Olie N. — the fiercely independent electro-pop provocateur out of Québec City — is precisely that kind of document. It does not ask for your attention. It takes it.

Trevor Ouellette has spent his career as Egregious Beats doing something that sounds deceptively simple and proves, in practice, fiendishly difficult: making electronic music that actually makes you feel something. Not the vague, algorithmic warmth of a thousand playlist-optimised tracks, not the aggressive anonymity of pure floor-filling techno, but something with genuine emotional weather — lush, driving, and lit from within by what can only be called conviction. *A Good Time* is the purest distillation of that ambition yet, and it arrives fully formed, grinning, and absolutely certain of itself.

Some bands announce themselves. Dead Summer detonate themselves. "Take It or Leave It," the opening salvo from Nate Prevedoros and Michael Wilford, is the kind of record that doesn't politely introduce itself at the door — it kicks the door clean off its hinges, walks straight to your record player, and dares you to object.