Deep in the mountains of Preston County, West Virginia, a group of alternative education teachers started writing songs to connect with the young people in their classrooms. Those songs grew into Alternative Ed, a fiercely independent alternative rock band built to show students how far creativity can carry them. Now the Kingwood crew are cranking the volume higher than ever with "Oblivion," a heavy, hard-charging new single that opens the door to their upcoming album 'Realitivity,' arriving in spring 2027.

 A morning coffee gave Nina Lynn a lot more than caffeine. She was at home brewing her first cup of the day when a melody and a beat arrived fully formed. She tapped the rhythm out on the kitchen counter and caught it on a voice memo before it could slip away. That little moment of inspiration has bloomed into “Daisy,” a shimmering, enchanting new single from the Guelph singer and multi-instrumentalist that marks the start of a dreamy new chapter in her music.

What is this new normal we are living in, and how long are we going to put up with it? That question drives "New Normal," the explosive new single from Los Angeles alt rock collective MASHA. and the Fam, out now. It began in Baltimore in 2015, in the days after Freddie Gray died in police custody, and it took frontwoman Masha Alexis nine years to finish. Today, with immigration raids in the headlines and Americans heading to the polls this November, it sounds more urgent than ever.

https://mashaandthefam.bandcamp.com/

 One listen to Ella Fitzgerald's "Mack the Knife" and Ori Dagan was hooked for life. Now the award-winning Toronto jazz singer has made the kind of record that first inspired him. 'Live in the Market,' his fifth album and first live recording, arrives October 23 on G-THREE Records, and he celebrates the next night with a release concert at Toronto's Heliconian Hall on October 24.

 https://www.youtube.com/OriDaganJazz

Cheap noodles, long nights and just enough gas to reach the next town. That's how Low Budget Rock Star earned their name, and it's the spirit they still bring to every stage. Now the Indigenous power pop rockers from Opaskwayak Cree Nation and The Pas, Manitoba are serving up something sweet: "Cotton Candy," a bright, irresistible new single out now on the Indigenous owned New Sun Records, with a music video featuring Melody McArthur.

"Cotton Candy" is pure sugar rush, a joyful, sing along rock song bursting with hooks and good feeling. The chorus sticks like its namesake: "Like cotton candy / Drives me crazy / Pour some on me / Call me baby." It shows off a brighter, more expansive side of the band while keeping the heart and emotional depth that fans have come to love.

Powerhouse Edmonton Singer-Songwriter Delivers Her Most Personal and Triumphant Work to Date

Dahlia Wakefield, one of Western Canada’s most dynamic and versatile singer-songwriters, releases her soaring new single “Light of the Phoenix” on all major streaming platforms worldwide. The track is the fourth and most anticipated single from her forthcoming rock album 'Phoenix Rising,' scheduled for a full release in October 2026 via Skyrocket Records, and it arrives as a defining statement of resilience, self-reclamation, and creative momentum from an artist who has been building toward this moment for two decades.

Horns blazing, piano rolling and a big, generous heart at the centre of it all, Brandon Isaak is back with "World's Got the Blues," a rousing new single from his eighth solo album, 'Lookin' Out My Window,' both out now on Modern Primitive Records. The album follows his triumphant 2025 release 'Walkin' With the Blues,' which won three of its five Canadian Blues Music Award nominations: Electric Blues Album of the Year, Blues Song of the Year and Blues Guitar Player of the Year. "I came home from Toronto incredibly grateful," Isaak says, "and then I did what I always do. I went back to work."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Rf5ZDzSb0

The song traces back to an old bit of guitar-world folklore. René Huard explains: "Based on an anecdotal urban legend, jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery replied to a journalist's question, 'Do you find time to practice guitar while you're touring?' Wes quipped, 'I just open the guitar case every once and a while, and toss a chunk steak in.' Ding-a-ling-a-ling, went the Pavlovian songwriter bell in my brain. Life on the road, wearisome, tedious, sometimes perilous! Didn't B.B. King run into a burning building to save Lucille? Guitar man's best friend, sharp teeth and strings that bend."

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dganq-2D_7U

 D-Tension & The Secrets have released their eponymous debut album, 'D-Tension & The Secrets,' a nine-song set led by the single "Hate To See You Go." The record spans rock, alt rock, punk and power pop without settling on any single lane for long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83h8rK-WvPI

Blues Guitar-Driven Singer-Songwriter Ash Ravens Sends Out 'Letters from an Alien' Oct. 20, Led by Starlit Single "Last Letter from an Alien"

At 3 a.m., with sleep nowhere in sight, Ash Ravens reached for his gold top Les Paul and started playing a rhythmic figure over and over until a song took shape around it. By sunrise, "Last Letter from an Alien" was finished. That late night burst of inspiration now opens 'Letters from an Alien,' the raw, intimate, and beautifully personal new album from the Ottawa singer, songwriter and guitarist, arriving Oct. 20 on Raven's Nest Music. Ravens wrote, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered nearly every note himself, crafting a seven-song collection about being a stranger in the world and finding the way home.

Cities of red earth rise out of the Moroccan landscape, shaped by hand from clay that can be moulded, reshaped, and formed again and again. That timeless image sits at the heart of Deadly Alfano, the captivating new solo project from veteran Toronto musician and songwriter Francesco Alfano, who has released his soulful new single "Shelter."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnX0VQkTy4&feature=youtu.be

Winnipeg based drummer, composer and producer Esteban Seunarine releases his third album, 'The Expanding Whatever,' on September 16 through his own label, Rice and Beans, led by the single "Arts & Crafts for Robots." The record exists because an entirely different one fell apart first.

 Listen on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/23OSZqZooYY2DgKFrX2aeG?si=OvxRXgiRSmy2A2rsHnJwxA&nd=1&dlsi=9043936540c54efd

Ayden Hutch releases his debut single, "Waitin' On Your Lovin'," out now, the first taste of his debut album, 'Sadness, Anger, & Something Greater,' due October 2. The song sets the tone for a record built on vintage soul and R&B warmth, tracked entirely to analog tape.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Ak-p7xH-w

Mensa Dropout's long awaited debut EP, 'Nuclear Slush Breaker,' is finally here. The band has been trying to get this record out since 2004, when it first came together and recorded a batch of songs on a forty-dollar boombox. That version never made it out either, once lead singer Ash Buchholz was swept up by his own rocketing career fronting Canadian alternative rock band USS. The project resurfaced in 2016 with Steph Seki on bass and Tokyo Speirs on drums, only for a second unreleased EP to stall out when Speirs was recruited into global act Walk Off The Earth. It took an unlikely message in 2024, from YouTube fingerboarding phenomenon SkatepunxFB in search of music for a video, to finally bring the band back together. With guitarist Brett Carruthers now behind the six string, Mensa Dropout released the track "Disconnection" in 2025 and is finally closing the loop with 'Nuclear Slush Breaker,' proof that it is never too late for dropouts to drop back in.

 Aurora, Ontario singer-songwriter Laura Fortini releases "Shattered," the second track she has released to the public, though it will land as the tenth song on her forthcoming 14 track, self-titled debut album. The song arrives eight months after her debut single, "Look In," released October 10, 2025, and comes ahead of her later radio debut, "Lights Went Out," which looked back on a bittersweet teenage memory.

"Shattered" pulls from something far closer to the bone, a private family struggle Fortini watched her twin brother go through, and the helplessness of wanting to stand beside him while not being able to say so out loud.

THE ELEM follows "Could It Be Me?" with "Who's There?" an emotionally layered rock song that transforms personal loss into something closer to ritual. Where the last single asked a philosophical question about faith at arm's length, "Who's There" brings the discussion home, built around a single relationship, a specific guilt, and the kind of love that outlasts the person who gave it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAhMXIuodoA

Like far too many women, Chloe Sofia learned at just 16 what it means to have strangers cross the line online, unsolicited messages and images sliding into her DMs from men she's never met. In "Girl on the Internet," out now, the Toronto pop/pop-rock singer-songwriter turns that experience into a hook built for shouting back, delivering a pointed, propulsive answer to online harassment that refuses to apologize for taking up space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A5zqWQTzKk

Toronto-based producer, DJ, and beatmaker Ladji Mouflet unveils "Hatuey," a warrior of a single that pulls its title and its spirit from one of Caribbean history's most defiant figures.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxlic_BU78E

Built on the hypnotic percussion and rolling low end that have become his signature, the track finds Ladji at his most physical, a record made for the dance floor that carries something much older underneath it.

Cape Town, South Africa artist Esspi, the project of singer-songwriter Sarah Pearson, releases her new album, 'FAUXstalgia,' led by focus track "Retrograde," both  out now. The album takes its title from a word Esspi coined herself while studying the meaning of nostalgia in college, sitting in her mother's office one afternoon doing homework. "I went, wow, that's an emotion I experience every day, but I didn't know it existed," she says. "I knew the word was too iconic not to use." FAUXstalgia, as she defines it, is the feeling of mourning a time you never lived, or deeply understanding an emotion you never personally felt.

 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=qSQJh6t95a0

Cobourg, Ontario based Lo & the High Road release "Salem," the latest single from their sophomore album, 'Standing Stones,' out October 2. Written by Lauren Halász and Colin McMahon, "Salem" trades the duo's usual fantasy and folklore for real history, drawing directly from the Salem Witch Trials and the words of the women who did not survive them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SueooE3HvYA