Founded in Birmingham, Alabama in 2011, St. Paul & the Broken Bones is an eight-piece ensemble that burst onto the scene with their 2014 debut Half the City. The album established a sound that quickly became a calling card for the group and landed them a spot at major festivals, including Lollapalooza, Coachella and Glastonbury. After receiving critical praise from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, SPIN and NPR, the band started sharing stages with some of the world’s biggest artists, including Elton John and The Rolling Stones, before launching an impressive run of headlining tours. The group has continued to expand their sound with every record, branching out well beyond old school soul into sleek summertime funk and classic disco on albums like 2018’s Young Rick Camellia. Their forthcoming LP, Angels in Science Fiction, stretches even further, building on the shadowy psychedelia and intricate, experimental R&B of 2022’s The Alien Coast.

Donovan Woods is an acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter whose album Both Ways won the 2019 JUNO Award for contemporary roots album and whose global streams have surpassed 210 million. That success hasn’t impacted the Ontario native’s sense of humour though. Woods was in on the joke when he named his latest release Big Hurt Boy, which he self-describes as poking fun at himself for writing songs about getting dumped and theoretically being a big sad guy. More seriously, Big Boy Hurtis a six-song exploration of how failures – and the fixation on them – not only shape, but enlighten people. This EP is the follow-up to Wood’s celebrated album, Without People, which he made in isolation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Woods’ deep curiosity about the human condition makes his music deeply relatable and helps audiences clearly hear their own stories in his.

Wild Rivers first caught audience’s attention with their 2016 self-titled debut, followed by two EPs (2018’s Eighty-Eight and 2020’s Songs to Break Up To). Sonically, the Toronto based trio pulls from a spectrum of sounds, imbuing pop, rock, indie, and folk into each song’s blueprint. Their most recent album Sidelines touches on coming-of-age themes, such as learning how to be more present and coming to terms with life’s unpredictability. In many ways, the group’s own story is one of embracing the unknown. Born in Canada, Khalid, who is half-Egyptian, and Devan, who spent her childhood in London, England before returning to Canada, first connected at Queen’s University in Kingston in 2013. Starting out as an acoustic singer-songwriter project, Khalid and Devan expanded their aesthetic to a more full-bodied sound, adding multi-instrumentalist Andrew Oliver.

Begonia is the moniker of Canadian artist Alexa Dirks, a largely autobiographical singer-songwriter whose intimate lyrics and pop style sound makes her music honest and refreshingly relatable. Following the dissolution of her JUNO Award Winning former group, Chic Gamine, Dirks knew it was time to set out on her own. The Winnipeg-based artist released her first solo output in 2017 with the EP, Lady in Mind, which was well-received, being listed on NPR’s 10 Artists You Need To Know in 2017 and the song Juniper reached number one on the CBC Music Charts that same year. With Begonia’s debut full length album entitled Fear expected next year, Dirks leans hard into a sense of arrival. Dirks wrote and co-produced the record with a familiar team: Matt Schellenberg and Matt Petters of Royal Canoe, along with Marcus Paquin, who has previously worked with The National, Stars, Local Natives, to name a few.