It's been said every year since we hit 2020, but 2025 truly feels like maybe we're not meant to be here. Twenty twenty five? That's a sci-fi number! That's a poorly received Chris Pratt-starring space movie year! And yet, here we are, breathing and eating and working and listening to music in 2025.
If we're gonna be here (and it certainly seems like we are), we might as well make the best of it. To help with that noble goal, Exclaim! has gathered our 28 most anticipated Canadian albums of the new year. From scrappy fresh faces to longstanding favourites, every artist on this list has something exciting — maybe even life-changing — to share with us in the coming months.
Here are our most anticipated Canadian albums of 2025.
Naya Ali
We Did the Damn Thing
(Bonsound)
Release date: February 7
Naya Ali's latest promises a genre-agnostic sprint through the Ethiopian-Canadian artist's brain, a collection of pop songs that filter punk, Afrobeats, country and trap through Ali's steely delivery and keen melodic sense. The single "Life" is bursting with… well, life; an urgent and uplifting (but never corny) treatise on the state of being. She does the damn thing.
Bonnie Trash
Mourning You
(Hand Drawn Dracula)
Release date: February 28
Twin sisters Emmalia and Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor have expanded their family — Mourning You, Bonnie Trash's latest dispatch from the shadows, finds the duo growing into a four-piece, blowing their haunting sound to fright-night proportions. Equal parts beautiful and ferocious, Mourning You is a full-throated roar from the abyss, an album that prizes patience and release in equal measure. And yet, for all the dark corners, the album is shot through with just enough light; these are the band's most universal spells yet.
Basia Bulat
Basia's Palace
(Secret City Records)
Release date: February 21
You can always count on Basia Bulat. The Etobicoke legend is a steady boat in the rough waters of time, always returning just when you need her with a new record of affirming, illuminating songs. Basia's Palace welcomes us deeper into her kingdom than we've been before, tackling age and mortality and parenthood and place with Bulat's reliably clear eye. If the rich, glimmering "Baby" is any indication, Basia's Palace will continue her reign.
Alessia Cara
Love & Hyperbole
(Def Jam Recordings)
Release date: February 14
Fans have grown up with Alessia Cara, who was still in her late teens when she broke out with the huge debut single "Here" in 2015. Now a decade later, the Grammy- and JUNO-winning artist (a former Exclaim! cover star) continues to evolve with her fourth full length, which she calls her "best work to date — or at least my personal favourite." Lead single "(Isn't It) Obvious" caps off its late-night dance groove with a sultry solo from John Mayer.
Lou-Adriane Cassidy
Journal d'un Loup-garou
(Bravo musique)
Release date: January 24
They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but we'll somehow always find a way to cast a classic supernatural horror villain in a new light. There's faith to be had in the concept left in the fur-covered, clawed hands of Québécois artist Cassidy, who is among our country's best-kept secret maestros of gravitas in simple stage theatrics. On Journal d'un Loup-garou, her monster is trapped in a downward spiral, and finding solace from the sorry state of show business in influences as wide-ranging in genre as they are in era — from '80s prog rhythms to Caroline Polachek's winding vocal melodies.
Rose Cousins
Conditions of Love - Vol. 1
(Old Farm Pony Records)
Release date: March 14
Nova Scotia's Rose Cousins is here to tell us about love; in her own words, she's come to explore the ways it "feels great and makes us ridiculous. It's tiring and intense, joyful and devastating." Vol. 1 of that treatise promises more of Cousins's deftly rendered, soul-inflected pop music. Light as air but deep as space, lead single "I Believe in Love (and it's very hard)" makes a simple declaration sound like the bravest thing you could ever admit.
Art d'Ecco
Serene Demon
(Paper Bag Records)
Release date: February 14
Art d'Ecco's music has never been short on ambition, but Serene Demon finds the Victoria-based artist climbing new heights. With a keen ear for playful pastiche and unfamiliar territories, d'Ecco imbues Serene Demon with an alien quality that never pushes one away — instead, it pulls you in and asks that you acclimatize to its strange weather. Squelchy synth pop, wily post-punk and luxurious prog collide in d'Ecco's neon-smeared underworld; it's easy to get lost in.
Marie Davidson
City of Clowns
(DEEWEE)
Release date: February 28
Marie Davidson is always good for a laugh or a sweat or a cry — whatever release you need, she's got the beat to let it out. City of Clowns, her fifth record, sees her swinging away from the lush throwback pop and grimy prog of Renegade Breakdown and back to the shadowy dance floors where she made her name. Created alongside Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau, City of Clowns promises shit talk and body talk in equal measure.
Devours
Sports Car Era
(surviving the game)
Release date: March 14
For many people, the midlife crisis involves unaffordable sports cars and other regrettable decisions. Luckily for fans, Jeff Cancade has marked turning 40 with a new album — and judging by the title track, it offers more of the dissonant synth clang and honeyed pop confessionals that listeners have come to expect from the Vancouver artist.
Frog Eyes
TBA
(Paper Bag Records)
Release date: TBA
"I don't normally write riffs," Frog Eyes leader Carey Mercer said in a statement announcing the BC band's upcoming 2025 album — but that changes in the recent single "E-E-Y-O-R-E (That's Me!)," its anxious, tightly-wound post-punk guitar adding a new flavour to the band's jittery indie rock. This will be the follow-up to 2022's The Bees and the second full-length since their brief breakup in 2018.
Saya Gray
SAYA
(Dirty Hit)
Release date: February 21
The first single from Daniel Caesar's former creative director's long-awaited debut album might be a red herring. Press notes described SAYA as the result of Toronto-based Gray having "sanded and fine tuned the rough edges of records past into more cohesive works of melodic folk songcraft," but lycanthropic second single "H.B.W" leapt into the night from the front porch of twangy lead-off "SHELL ( OF A MAN )" with teeth sharpened by the shadowy post-genre edges of the woods she's spent past EPs (QWERTY and QWERTY II) and mixtapes (19 MASTERS) dwelling in.
Charlie Houston
Big After I Die
(Arts & Crafts)
Release date: January 31
Buzzy pop songs that recall Billie Eilish as much as they do Le Tigre, Charlie Houston's Big After I Die is a punchy collection of sapphic love songs and bruising kiss offs. Slyly strange but never lacking pop hooks, songs like "Slut for Excel" (is that a Talking Heads sample bubbling in the background?) and "Pink Cheetah Print Slip" are bursting with personality and major songwriting chops. Get used to the name Charlie Houston.
HORSEBATH
Another Farewell
(Strolling Bones Records)
Release date: February 7
The worlds of alternative and pop music (are these even separate worlds anymore?) have been overrun with country music as of late. As such, you've gotta be pretty special to make an impression anymore. HORSEBATH — the Halifax-and-Montreal based country rock band that boasts constantly rotating, instrument-swapping lead vocalists — are that kind of special. Throwback, camp-lite outlaw country that shimmers like oil on water, Another Farewell is dead-serious about not taking things too seriously.
Maddie Jay
I Can Change Your Mind
(Real Canadian Cheddar)
Release date: January 10
Having toured with the likes of Lorde and Remi Wolf, Smithers, BC-hailing Maddie Jay's approach to so-called bedroom pop has a level of textural sophistication, refinement and clarity. The crystallization process of I Can Change Your Mind took two years and embracing being "an unreliable narrator" of her own life — all with a diaphanous landscape of dreamy tape loops, breathy word-painting tinged with artful Auto-Tune, and the occasional Aphex Twin electronic breakdown.
Kestrels
Better Wonder
(Darla Records)
Release date: February 14
Since forming in 2008, songwriter Chad Peck has steadily channelled shoegaze and alt-rock from his home base in Nova Scotia. Better Wonder combines decade-old songs from a scrapped solo album and tracks written during 2021's pandemic isolation, which are united by a sense of nocturnal anxiety and what Peck calls a "murky, uncomfortable sound."
Marlaena Moore
Because You Love Everything
(Session / Bonsound)
Release date: January 17
It's all enormous for the Montreal-via-Edmonton singer-songwriter. Releasing the Scott "Monty" Munro-produced follow-up to 2020's Pay Attention, Be Amazed! nearly five (totally uneventful) years later, the stakes of her songs feel towering — a lighthouse in the fog of disorientation so many of us have felt lost in, as our worlds have ended time and time again. Yet here we remain, hungry as ever for something to make us feel like the salt-of-the-earth groundswell of Marlaena Moore song.
Peter Dreams and MOONRIIVR
Peter Dreams and MOONRIIVR
(Six Shooter Records)
Release date: February 14
Known as the grizzly voice holding down July Talk's low end, Peter Dreimanis flies solo as Peter Dreams on Peter Dreams and MOONRIIVR, recorded alongside — you guessed it — Toronto's MOONRIIVR. Like a deconstructed Springsteen, Dreimanis's solo debut is all dark, driving post-punk that spreads like a deep bruise.
Motherhood
Thunder Perfect Mind
(Forward Music Group)
Release date: January 24
Motherhood know how to make a racket, but theirs is a considered hubbub. Always electrifying but never cluttered, the singles that lead Thunder Perfect Mind manage to make tornadoes from a few key elements. Equal parts rockabilly, psych, garage rock and art school experimentation, these songs careen through the mind like white-hot pinballs. Get into the mess.
N NAO
Nouveau Langage
(Mothland)
Release date: January 31
The experimental pop project of Naomi de Lorimier lives where trance and transcendence meet. Her third album as N NAO furthers her mission statement of blending organic and electronic sounds by leaning into the latter in a whole new way. Sometimes it's through synthetic fibres and processed filters that we're able to reconnect with our most instinctual, embodied selves, which the willowy haze of irresistible sway that the soft four-on-the-floor of lead single "Corps" invites feels like a testament to.
No Frills
Sad Clown
(We Are Busy Bodies)
Release date: March 7
The follow-up to No Frills' 2022 debut Downward Dog, Sad Clown was recorded with some help from from Eliza Niemi on cello, Alex Hamlyn on saxophone and Kristina Koski on flute, and that additional filigree makes it the Toronto band's most lush and fully realized work yet. Of course, that doesn't mean anything on Sad Clown sounds laboured or tense — just listen to lead single "Shopping in the Toothpaste Aisle" and get lost in the song's nervy haze.
Ken Presse
Someday
(Independent)
Release date: January 17
Ken Presse's lush country-folk songs strike a careful balance between modernity and tradition. While his voice and phrasing recall today's folk-R&B radio balladeers, the patient strings and silvery fingerpicking of songs like "If I Could" hint at something wiser, less easy to define. The gentle country stomp of "Like Hell I do" expands on Presse's sonic world, and promises that Someday will find the Quebec songwriter stronger than ever.
Salin
Rammana
(Independent)
Release date: March 28
Thailand-born, Canada-based composer Salin introduces a new genre with her album Rammana, one she calls "Afro Isaan soul." It combines the psychedelic fretwork of '70s West African music with the sounds of northeastern Thailand — a hypnotic, groove-based hybrid heard on the infectious single "PUAJ."
Christian Sean
Hallelujah Showers
(Bonsound)
Release date: January 31
Montreal's Christian Sean keeps things just weird enough. The producer and songwriter's alien falsetto places his songs in the ether, always at risk of floating away completely. An experimentalist with a pop star in his heart, Sean's songs — like the frenetic, burbling "Cold Water" and the Tirzah-meets-Tame Impala stomp of "Eventide" — never get too comfortable, always on the verge of either fight or flight. It's music with genuine vision, and Hallelujah Showers has plenty more to show.
Silverstein
Antibloom / Pink Moon
(UNFD)
Release date: February 21
The double follow-up to 2022's Misery Made Me, Antibloom / Pink Moon is just another big swing from a band who have never slowed down for a minute — 11 albums in 19 years! — and it finds the hardcore mavericks in fine form, continuing to tighten their well-established sound and keeping up with the endless waves of hardcore that have spring up in the wake of their 2003 debut. You know the old saying, 12th and 13th time's the charm.
Spiritbox
Tsunami Sea
(Pale Chord / Rise Records)
Release date: March 7
Produced by Dan Braunstein and Mike Stringer, Tsunami Sea marks Spiritbox's even-more-assured full-length follow-up to their watershed debut, 2021's Eternal Blue. If singles like "Soft Spine" and "Perfect Soul" are any indication, the band's latest will find them scaling even greater heights of enormity.
The Weather Station
Humanhood
(Next Door Records / Fat Possum Records)
Release date: January 17
Tamara Lindeman may want to be brat, but thank God she's not. So few artists have Lindeman's purity of voice, her refusal to lean on easy answers, and never has that been more true than on Humanhood. Lead singles "Neon Signs" and "Window" find Lindeman and her band at their improvisational peak, sending enormous human feeling through the dazzling kaleidoscope of her jazz-influenced art rock. A deepening of the world opened on 2021's Ignorance, Humanhood promises piercing clarity in a time of endless obfuscation.
The Weeknd
Hurry Up Tomorrow
(XO)
Release date: January 24
Arguably Canada's biggest pop export of the current moment, the Weeknd is bouncing back after a rough patch marked by 2023's The Idol. While his transition into TV has been rocky, he's been on a hot streak with his beloved recent albums After Hours (2020) and Dawn FM (2022) — and Hurry Up Tomorrow marks the completion of the trilogy begun with those two prior albums.
CJ Wiley
So Brand New
(Tiny Kingdom)
Release date: February 28
CJ Wiley keeps things simple in order to get complex. Warm guitars, steady drums and lively bass — sometimes that's all you need to start a fire. Wiley's Boy Golden-produced debut lights all kinds of fires, an ever-shifting document of change and renewal that finds Wiley working in a meat-and-potatoes country mode that touches on throwback pop rock and gentle folk. Latest single "Adelaide" is a pick-me-up that feels like it's been around forever — some truths never truly lose their lustre.