The firehose of new content never turns off. Amidst the constant gushing stream of blockbuster albums — and then deluxe versions, remixes and reissues of those same blockbuster albums — it's easy for lower-profile releases to sink beneath the surface and be forgotten.
While we've already counted down our 50 favourite albums and 20 favourite songs of 2024, we're also taking a moment to shine a line on our favourite Canadian albums you might have missed — ones that might not have defined summer or dominated the charts, but are worth savouring and celebrating nevertheless.
Blunt Chunks
The Butterfly Myth
(Telephone Explosion Records)
One of the best fun facts I learned in 2024 was that a caterpillar's resistance to transforming into a butterfly is an integral part of its cell turnover, triggering a chemical reaction necessary for metamorphosis. Toronto's Caitlin Woelfle-O'Brien — who makes soulful indie folk music as Blunt Chunks — taught me this with The Butterfly Myth, which constructs a steady, sonically rich tapestry as a chrysalis in the continuous balancing act of grieving, using her radiant voice as a vehicle for clenched fists to take flight.
Megan LaPierre
Jennifer Castle
Camelot
(Royal Mountain Records)
Jennifer Castle's latest may just be the best work of her career. On Camelot, Castle's writing is sharper, her music warmer, her instincts more fluid and expansive. From the record's opening line — "I've been sleeping in the unfinished basement" — Castle creates a world that's equal parts fantasy and grounded realism, the known universe as seen through stained glass. Few records released this year feel so lived in, so awake with meaning.
Kaelen Bell
d'Eon
Leviathan
(Hausu Mountain Records)
On Leviathan, d'Eon continues orchestrating MIDI chamber instruments in similar fashion to 2021's Rhododendron. Compared to its predecessor, things feel a touch more ordered and ornate this time around, its duelling instruments and dovetailing melodies lingering past listen's end. Whether on R&B records, or in RPG and RTS games, you've surely crossed these tones and timbres before — though rarely wielded like this.
Calum Slingerland
Energy Slime
Planet Perfect
(We Are Time)
"Pristine" is the first word that comes to mind with the sophomore release from the Vancouver DIY duo, which arrived 10 years removed from their debut, New Dimensional. It was all recorded in the spouses' studio apartment, yet the world-building of Planet Perfect really happens in its polished harmonic orchestration of a tight, Sparks-esque brand of new wave pop that transcends time and space. It's only belied — and brought back to the present day's disarray and relative lack of colour — by similarly goofy observations on how "keeping up is such a chore / In the year 2024."
Megan LaPierre
Falcon Jane
Legacy
(Darling)
Every Falcon Jane era marks a reinvention. On Legacy, Sara May wears many 10-gallon hats while exploring country archetypes, giving tender sympathy to small-town lovers, cheaters, deadbeats and nomads. She has a knack for pulling your heartstrings while keeping it real, injecting a bit of herself into every Tele-lined riff, bright acoustic chord and plea. "You never really knew me / I'm just a fantasy, I'm starting to believe that," May howls on "I Get Myself," finding catharsis in ugly truths.
Sydney Brasil
Future Star
It's About Time!
(Mint Records)
The double meaning of It's About Time!'s title gestures toward both the arrival of the Vancouver songwriter's Mint Records debut and the lyrical content of her tender keyboard pop tunes, which are as cute as they are wistful, filled as they are with warm-hearted reminiscences of old friends — "The people that stayed / And the people who could still come back."
Alex Hudson
Terry Green
Provisional Living
(Zegema Beach Records)
Worth every last bit of the wait since their debut LP arrived in 2017, Provisional Living proves Terry Green to be skillful in maintaining musical tension, unrelenting in their ragged outbursts of punk and screamo, canny in moments of post-hardcore precision. It's the Mississauga outfit's duality that makes their return so electric.
Calum Slingerland
Jamboree
Summerland
(Independent)
A scrappy ode to the places that made it, Jamboree's Summerland is a map of feeling, tracing the grimy minutiae and soaring emotion of a time-melting summer. The band have expanded their sound since 2022's Life in the Dome, and their music now breathes more deeply, coloured by a newfound confidence and willingness to stretch the limits of their math-y, emo-adjacent sound. Considered but never belaboured, Summerland casts this Winnipeg trio in a newfound light.
Kaelen Bell
Little Kid
A Million Easy Payments
(Orindal Records)
They may be first-time Exclaim! year-end listers, but the gospel of Little Kid is extensive. The Toronto band have seven albums to their name alongside an EP, a live record, and a humble but devout fanbase. On A Million Easy Payments, Little Kid are at their best. The album's twangy folk rock — filled with love, doubts, sadness and Christian imagery — is wholly captivating, but Little Kid ascend to new heights on the powerful standout track "Bad Energy."
Laura Stanley
Jon McKiel
Hex
(You've Changed Records)
In a music climate where the term "bedroom pop" is applied to big-budget, major-label albums that just happen to feature a guitar and sound a bit mellow, New Brunswick's Jon McKiel makes music that truly sounds DIY. Rickety soul grooves anchor the title track and "Still Life" like haunted relics of the Brill Building era, while clickity-clacky loops patter through "String" and "Under Burden" like skittering spiders, and "Everlee" throws back to the honeyed pop balladry of the Everly Brothers.
Alex Hudson
DJ Muggs & Raz Fresco
The Eternal Now
(Soul Assassins Records)
"It's like my favourite art nowadays, another way to pick the brain apart / The game ain't for the faint of heart," Raz Fresco raps over DJ Muggs's tearful strings on The Eternal Now. The Toronto hero is assuredly barred up across his collab with the Cypress Hill icon, a milestone release further cementing his underground kingship over the producer's rich jazz chops and smoked-out samples. We've known Fresco to be marvellous, and, after over a decade in the game, things are beginning to feel timeless.
Calum Slingerland
The OBGMs
SORRY, IT'S OVER
(Burn Industry)
On their latest effort SORRY, IT'S OVER, the OBGMs double down on cathartic lyricism and raw intensity to blistering extremes. Collaborating with the likes of PUP's Stefan Babcock, Hotel Mira's Charlie Kerr and METZ's Alex Edkins, with features from SATE, Just John and Faiza, the Toronto punks deliver nine tight, crunchy rippers that are a blast to tear up the pit to. No apologies required.
Matt Owczarz
Nearly two decades since their last album, Vancouver's P:ano return with a sweetly nostalgic collection of indie pop reflections on getting older and reconnecting with long-lost friends. ba ba ba isn't a throwback to the cabaret pop of their aughts run, but rather a warmly empathetic tour through the memories of their youth in Coquitlam, BC, delivered with traces of Stereolab, Belle and Sebastian, and jazzy, soul-inflected pop.
Alex Hudson
Klô Pelgag
Abracadabra
(Secret City Records)
Following in the footsteps of 2020's Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs, Klô Pelgag's fourth LP, Abracadabra, reveals another side of the Quebec singer-songwriter, relying on synths to create an otherworldly sound. Taking its inspiration from sources such as new wave and French pop, the album plays like a study in contrast, floating between ethereal songs and others that feel designed for the dance floor. As usual with Pelgag, the textured arrangements are full of surprising details, with thought-provoking lyrics dealing with childhood fears, death and the passage of time.
Bruno Coulombe
Poirier
Quiet Revolution
(Novisa)
It's all in the name for Montreal's Ghislain Poirier, whose Quiet Revolution eschews any notion of dance music maximalism. Rather, the producer's 12th album is defined by its gentleness, achieved through its meld of electric and acoustic instruments, zephyr-like keys and unhurried grooves — all of which are elevated by a worldly group of guest vocalists.
Calum Slingerland
Toronto-born Abby Sage is a purveyor of a brand of macabre, off-kilter indie pop just hauntingly wonky enough to make it bloom perennial. Her debut LP is aptly titled; not only did it arrive in a year when Oxford University Press named "brain rot" its Word of the Year, its fluid yet unpredictable melodies are ones that return to prick the hair on the back of your neck when you least expect it, just to find that their nursery rhyme-refrains remain riddled within your very bones.
Megan LaPierre
Saltwater Hank
Siip'nsk
(Nikamo Musik)
Songwriting is often a form of capture — the act of suspending an idea or feeling forever in amber. On Ts'msyen artist Saltwater Hank's Siip'nsk, however, songs are not immutable time capsules; instead, they're incubation chambers. The music on Siip'nsk feels alive with possibility, mutating endlessly into the future. With every word sung in Hank's native Sm'algya̱x, his latest pulls legend into the present, a meat-and-potatoes rock record that crashes through the veil between our world and that which moves alongside us. Thrashing, joyous and held down by a small but formidable wrecking crew — Danny Bell on drums, Melissa Walker on bass, and Hank on vocals and guitar — Siip'nsk is an act of preservation that never feels anything but entirely new.
Kaelen Bell
Mike Shabb
Sewaside III
(Independent)
After Mike Shabb came straight out the Montreal sewers on last year's Sewaside II, the third instalment in his release series is a polychromatic trip through the artist's mind and city's avenues. As MC and producer, it's his most consummate effort yet, and listeners should take notice — just like featured peers Boldy James, Navy Blue, ANKLEJOHN and Estee Nack already have.
Calum Slingerland
Rick White and the Sadies
Rick White and the Sadies
(Blue Fog Recordings)
Some musicians get together to work — others, to heal. When Dallas Good died suddenly in 2022, his Sadies bandmates kept his spirit alive by touring behind the music he worked so hard to hone. One of Good's creative soulmates, Rick White of Eric's Trip, followed through on a notion to reconvene with the Sadies for new songs. Yes, Dallas Good is sung about, but White's emotive songs are truly thoughtful presents because they conjure Good's presence.
Vish Khanna
Lana Winterhalt
Recovering Theatre Kid
(Independent)
The chattering ambiance of "Intro" opens Winnipegger Lana Winterhalt's Recovering Theatre Kid on an unassuming note — this is not a record that's easy to ignore, even in the rumble of a crowd. A songwriter and producer with a weighty, elastic voice, Winterhalt crafts her debut full-length like an architect, building towering pop songs draped in strings, layers of harmony and sparkling keyboards. It's a loose concept record of sorts, but Winterhalt never lets the conceit get in the way of her sterling songwriting; these songs are big containers for even bigger emotions.
Kaelen Bell
The Wesleys
The Wesleys
(Little Village Records)
While none of them are actually named Wesley, you could say that the spark plug Montreal quartet evoke Wesley Snipes with how sharp their jangly garage pop shoots to the beat. On their self-titled debut, their surf- and punk-kissed raw energy is channelled into crisp, frenetic riffing and sweeping, arpeggio-led mid-tempo numbers in equal measure, never sacrificing precision for fuzzy, loose-limbed spontaneity.
Megan LaPierre
Your Hunni
Welcome to the Party
(Independent)
You'll struggle to find a more genuine indie pop article than Your Hunni. Their first full-length, Welcome the Party, is an achingly honest letter to their younger self — the one who both feels so far removed from who they've become, but is still living inside their chest. Atop invigorating percussion-driven anthemic bedrock, they perceptively interrogate their place in broader conversations about queerness, gender identity and addiction with refreshingly affirming tenderness.
Megan LaPierre