With the passing of one lightly jazzy, overtly 70s-inspired song into the next, I overlayed this soundtrack onto visions of dinner parties with my closest friends and slow mornings with a loved one. My initial listen to this album brought one word to mind: love.

Joe Keery has been busy. Between being a Hollywood actor in hit television series Stranger Things and pursuing his own songwriting career, he is no stranger to making his art as unique to him as possible.

An endless, restless, masterful collage of shiny and symphonic instrumentalism and daringly ambitious storytelling.

Body Break’s debut is a simultaneously cute and deeply pissed-off twenty-minute paean to individual exploration, self-reflection, and finding harmony in dissonance.

Play With the Changes is full of positive affirmations and self-observation, allowing us to witness both her personal and musical growth with each track.

The ability for an album to sound so hectic and so controlled at the same time is nothing short of masterful.

This is an amazingly versatile album, that can be perceived as complex or as simple as the listener wants, and serves as a virtuous introduction to this genre.

A gem sent down from the bedroom pop gods.

Just enough time to sink into a blissful state of relaxation.

An album steeped in wonder, exploration, and beauty.

La Louma makes complex pop music sound effortless, and combines her classical training, her DIY punk ethos, and pop sensibilities to create an album confident in its clashes.

If people are complaining about the lack of “old-school” music in the modern day, then it’s clear they have not heard about Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings.

Bringing much needed warmth to the rainy Montreal weather

Schott embodies the saying “Less is more,” choosing to use sustained notes and hypnotically repetitive sequences to create a vast soundscape.

Deerhoof have always incorporated a variety of different musical genres and styles and on Mountain Moves it appears that they are ready to up the ante.

A call to stand up and dance in spite of the cloud of hopelessness that seems to have enveloped the world.

Awe-inspiring and fun, hitting an eerie fever pitch while compelling you to dance.

Soft Sounds is a mature album, one that manages to be catchy, heartbreaking and entrancing.

The work of the Montreal-based group Best Fern is not foreign to this blog — their self-titled EP, which was released around the end of the summer in 2016, stayed on CKUT’s charts.

While their overall performance style still has an air of youthful formality, the raw talent exhibited by these musicians cannot be denied.

Soulful garage-rock at its finest.

Emmett McCleary is of the opinion that it’s much easier to write a sad song than a happy one, though you might not catch it right away in his intricate, snappy tracks.

Philadelphia’s Alex Giannascoli has released his much-anticipated sixth full-length release, Rocket, and it is as murky and expansive as ever.