For someone who found his voice in music at an early age, Montreal-based singer-songwriter Fernie seems to be following his path with gentleness and a careful approach. His latest EP, Hopeless Dreams, released on Secret City Records, is a testament to this long journey—one where new doors have opened, and experiences have helped him mature and evolve. It suggests that Fernie still has much more to discover in the future.

Listen, listen—a world is speaking! A world where playfulness is a source of wisdom, and entertaining insane thoughts is serious business. For his third album, released on the Montreal-based label Secret City Records, Gus Englehorn named this world The Hornbook. With his wife, Estée Preda, by his side, the self-taught singer-songwriter and guitarist from Alaska has assembled a body of work that resembles an early-education tool for our hidden inner children—offering guidance on how to create a work of art. Mixed by Paul Leary (Butthole Surfers), his music isn’t a gentle stroll through the woods but rather a twisted mental exercise—a psychological thriller wrapped inside an obscure Jean Cocteau film, wrapped inside a children’s puppet show.

As a key figure of the Montreal independent music scene for almost twenty years, Annie-Claude Deschênes (PYPY, Duchess Says) is still driven by a constant need to create outside her comfort zone, to renew and grow through improvisation and provocation. Fuelled by a spontaneous creative impulse in her kitchen and hungry to take unplanned risks in her musical laboratory, the songs from her debut solo album, entitled LES MANIÈRES DE TABLE (released on Bonsound and Italians Do It Better), were conceived during the confinement to fill the void of inactivity, without initially being intended for public release. In the face of increasing digital surveillance, perhaps they should have been kept enclosed… Because everything seems hopeless when randomness starts to offend.