Since the late 1990s, Carrie Clark has been a familiar presence within the Hamilton, Ontario music scene, contributing her bass and vocal talents to myriad albums and live performances by local artists. Most recently, Clark has become a full-fledged member of alt-country outfit Matt Paxton & The Pintos [now simply The Pintos], whose 2023 EP Tornado received international acclaim. However, since 2020 Clark has been creating her own music, and subsequently released her debut EP, Roll Me Up Integrity, two years later. She has now followed it up with Resistor, a six-track collection that highlights her expansive musical range.
Working with Marco Bressette at Hamilton’s Deadquarters Studio, Clark called upon many colleagues to contribute to the sessions, but despite the variety of musical voices, Resistor adheres to Clark’s distinct creative vision.“I feel fortunate to have so many stellar musician friends,” she says. “We have all played together in so many unique situations, so recording is quite a natural and meditative experience. Marco and I have been friends since we were 16, rocking out in our early original bands.”
Resistor lifts off seductively with the atmospheric and semi-spoken “What Is Water,” which contains hints of the Hamilton scene’s patron saint Daniel Lanois. However, the song’s main inspiration, as Carrie explains, came from a Bruce Lee quote, “be water, my friend.” “The choices we make in any given moment define us, regardless of the choices made in the past, much like the fluidity of water. The calm lake after a storm doesn’t reveal a trace of the waves. You have to look at the surrounding land to discover its effects. The water itself can only be what it is at that moment.”
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| Photo - Myriam Riand |
Texas-based duo Crow and Gazelle announce their forthcoming album Truth Be Told, out May 15, with the release of its lead single “Fall How It Will.” A sweeping, spiritually charged concept album, Truth Be Told explores love, power, survival, and the truths buried beneath generations of fear. Across its songs, the duo tells the story of a woman and a man navigating a collapsing world, reckoning with inherited harm, confronting patriarchal control, and searching for a more liberated way to live and love.
“Fall How It Will” is a haunting meditation on religious trauma and return. Framed as a moment of care between the record’s two central characters, the song rejects the lie of original sin in favor of something more expansive: original love. With imagery of a boundless garden and the well of knowledge alive within us all, it becomes a quiet call to recognize one’s own worthiness - to lie down somewhere easy and let the night “fall how it will.”
“We live in a world shaped by shame that was never truly ours to carry,” Lawrence explains. “When you’re taught to believe you are inherently unworthy, that love only counts if it looks a certain way, it creates fear and separation. But love, real love, draws us back to the truth. It reminds us there was never anything wrong with us to begin with.”
Crow and Gazelle is Oklahoma Red Dirt pioneer Mike McClure and multidisciplinary artist Chrislyn Lawrence, whose creative partnership sits at the center of the album’s force. McClure, a founding member of The Great Divide and an Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee, is also a widely respected producer whose work has helped shape artists including Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours, and Kaitlin Butts. Lawrence brings an equally vital perspective as a poet, filmmaker, community organizer, and trauma-informed healer. Together, they create work that confronts difficult questions about belief, belonging, grief, and the myths that govern our lives.
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BWGiBWGAN just released “I’ll Be Around / The Slender Rowan,” the new double A-side single from Serafima and the Shakedowns. It’s the second single to be taken from the band’s debut album Ride Easy, on May 1.
Clocking in at under two minutes, “I’ll Be Around” is a life-affirming burst of pure joy - a heart-skipping showdown of warmth, colour, and bright-eyed promise that leaves you beaming. Serafima delivers it with a splash of old-time golden charm, kicking up a little dust and letting the good times lead the way. It’s the thrill of catching a face across the room your heart can’t quite forget, and that playful little thought drifting through your mind - “maybe I’ll let you take me out!!”. Cowboy boots filled with swagger, a melody that grins from ear to ear, and the Shakedowns riding an easy, buoyant groove make the whole thing feel like a two-step you didn’t know you needed.
On the flip side, “The Slender Rowan” reveals another shade of the band’s world. An arrangement of the traditional Russian folk song, it finds Serafima singing in fluent Russian while the Shakedowns lean into the melody’s old-world sway. The result feels both playful and timeless - a reminder that the band’s roots run wide, and that tradition can still feel alive on a dance floor.
Serafima’s songwriting sits somewhere between classic storytelling and left-field pop instinct. You can hear echoes of Johnny and June Carter Cash, Joni Mitchell, and Cake - not as pastiche, but as shared DNA. Her lyrics hit you in the heart and stick in your head - wry, time-twisting verses as deceptively complex as the lives they describe.
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Following their Swedish Grammy–nominated debut, the success of the Cinema Sound System EP, and their latest single “Sail (Lady In Waiting),” critically acclaimed cinematic soul outfit Sunnan recently returned with “Longing To Miss You” — the second single from their forthcoming sophomore album Spaghetti Soul, set for release in Autumn 2026.
According to the band, “Longing To Miss You” was the true spark behind Spaghetti Soul — the melody and emotional core that ignited the vision for the entire record. Written and recorded inside Fårö Church, with Ingmar Bergman resting just beyond its walls, the song was born in a setting deeply intertwined with the band’s cinematic identity.
The band explains: “Longing To Miss You emerged through questions of life, death, and how we all must learn to cope with the fact that loving also means losing.” With their signature Western-inspired sound — arpeggiated guitars, sweeping strings, and expansive arrangements — Sunnan explore loss not as inevitable doom, but as something that gives love its meaning. The result is a cinematic soundscape woven with melancholic lyricism — a testament to the strength, fragility, and enduring vitality of human emotion.
That vision carries into Spaghetti Soul, an album that deepens Sunnan’s cinematic exploration while expanding their sonic palette. If debut album Cinema was the feature film and Cinema Sound System the after party, Spaghetti Soul is their most immersive statement yet: a bold fusion of Italian Western grandeur and classic soul, filtered through a modern lens. The album positions Sunnan at the forefront of their self-defined genre, where orchestral drama meets raw emotional immediacy.
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