Cartel Madras
Age of the Goonda EP
Sub Pop 

If 2019 was the Year of Yeehaw in indie music, the Calgary firestarting hip-hop duo, Cartel Madras, said fuck all that white noise and split the country’s music scene wide open with their relentless, radical, queer, female, Desi raps that just won’t quit.

It’s a revolution in the making as Eboshi and Contra light up clubs across Canada, including in their new home of Toronto, while carving out incredible spaces on social media for their rapidly growing Goonda Gang.

In just two short EPs, including November’s Age of the Goonda, they’ve not only put Calgary rap on the map (a city that’s always been better known for its indie scene), but elevated the Thot Police collective and nailed their manifesto to every club and label door in the country.

2019 was, straight up, the year of Cartel Madras. They kicked it all off in January by announcing they’d signed to the seminal Sub Pop label, before blowing up shows in Calgary and selling out just about every room in town, including a must-not-miss banger set during Sled Island that was one of the festival’s highlights.

Inevitably, they moved to Toronto to fly closer to the sun and they embraced their increasing notoriety with lifestyle-defining aplomb: Cartel Madras are changing the way Canada sees Indian bodies in music, revolutionary leaders that come in real hot and never once consider apologizing for not staying in their lane.

It’s a new age for the riot grrl, less scuzzed up guitars and more legitimate riot fear overtop grimy trap beats, brown-girl-uprising, big-fuck-you-attitude, sexually-empowered Goondas. Cartel Madras are armed to the teeth and won’t stop until Goonda rap goes worldwide.

• Sebastian Buzzalino 

The Bobby Tenderloin Universe
The Bobby Tenderloin Universe
Keeping On Records 

One of Alberta’s most fun and iconic bands, The Wet Secrets, shed their trademark marching band outfits, shuffled some musicians around and added some colourful characters, emerging anew as the hazy, mysterious, impossibly cool Bobby Tenderloin Universe.

They wasted no time releasing their self-titled debut this year, cementing their spot amongst this year’s Yeehaw Class, including a match made in masked cowboy heaven with Orville Peck.

With their seamless blend of Lee Hazlewood-style crooning, Roger Miller wit and the larger-than-life vibes of peak cocaine-and-rhinestones-era 70s country, The Bobby Tenderloin Universe carved out a unique space for themselves in a crowded genre, and did so with all the style and charm of seasoned cowpokes.

• Sebastian Buzzalino 

nêhiyawak
nipiy
Arts & Crafts 

Drawing on their Indigenous roots, this amiskwaciy (Edmonton, Treaty 6) phenom takes their attention-grabbing name from their Plains Cree heritage.

The cooly contemporary, culturally significant, band’s debut on the Arts & Crafts label finds vocalist/guitarist/storyweaver Kris Harper, (cedar log) drummer Marek Tyler and synth player/bassist Matthew Cardinal carving out a perch for “those who don’t seem to fit in for myriads of reasons,” while creating a modern, atmospheric album that speaks to all quarters.

Sticking out their necks and letting down their hair, the neo-trad trio traces a path that runs to the heart of Canada’s musical past, present and future.

• Christine Leonard

Gone Cosmic
Sideways in Time
Kozmik Artifactz 

A supernova of a musical experiment, Gone Cosmic warps time and space around mindblowing guitar riffs, tetragonal rhythms and the air-raid warning vocals of onyx-tressed siren, Abbie Thurgood.

A basement-jam brainchild conceptualized by stringslingers Devin “Darty” Purdy and Brett Whittingham (of Calgary’s stoner rock mainstay, Chron Goblin), this intrepid crew blasts through alien landscapes navigating dire turns, deep pockets and soaring incantations that put the legions of Mars on high alert.

Interstellar jazz meets terrestrial grit as Gone Cosmic takes their audience on an acid-fuelled rocket ride around the sun before splashing down in a sea of psych-rock tranquility.

• Christine Leonard 

The Shiverettes
Real Shrill Bitches
Independent 

The feminist DIY resistance is alive and well in Western Canada, in no small part due to The Shiverettes’ relentless, razor sharp punk that came into its own on this year’s release, Real Shrill Bitches.

Louder, angrier and more confident than their debut, Dead Men Can’t Cat Call (2017), the foursome belt out rager after rager that seeks to dismantle patriarchial systems, calling out unlikeable dudes with bad rape jokes, incels, all cops that are bastards and uninspired boys’ clubs.

The Shiverettes stand at the head of a pack of bands committed to the resistance and Real Shrill Bitches is a spiky manifesto that’s not to be fucked with.

• Sebastian Buzzalino

36?
Milk Mountain
File Under: Music

2019 saw 36? evolve into a sprawling, shape-shifting art-rock freak collective that lives on the edge of life, comfortable in fringe DIY communities and outsider cultures.

Their latest release this year, Milk Mountain, was their debut on Vancouver’s File Under: Music label, and they’ve spent the better part of the past nine months on the road, hustling the album up and down the west coast on an endless tour that’s connecting them to communities of like-minded weirdos from Calgary to San Diego.

At the helm, Taylor Cochrane wrote some of his most vulnerable and introspective songs to date, elevating his own practice into anthemic jams for anyone who feels like they don’t fit in.

• Sebastian Buzzalino

Sunglaciers
Foreign Bodies
Independent 

A sweat-slicked fever dream of an album, Sunglaciers’ first full-length release reverberates with an electric intellect that shimmers like a sunset reflecting off a skyscraper.

Afloat in an emotionally-clouded atmosphere, Sunglaciers melt away artifice and presumption with an earnest appeal for the freedom and room to spread their wings.

Echoing the smooth transitions and pensive introspection of indie wavers The Psychedelic Furs and The Jesus and Mary Chain, singer-guitarist Evan Resnik feels his way through a forest of fuzzy memories while Mathieu Blanchard (drums), Kyle Crough (bass) and Helen Young (synths) seal the melodic mood rock envelope with a probing kiss and a subconscious prayer.

• Christine Leonard 

Altameda
Time Hasn’t Changed You
Independent

Crisp and clean, with just the right amount of grit to keep things interesting: the Altameda boys knock it out of the park on Time Hasn’t Changed You, a confident and solid ode to the best parts of Americana, alt-country and heartland rock.

It would be easy to draw a direct line to Bruce Springsteen, but Altameda move beyond that simple comparison through the sheer earnestness with which they perform.

They’re not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but what they do they do so great: rollicking summer road trip songs to blast on endless highways, and alt-country heart-tuggers to drain that last dram of whiskey to. It’s an album to which you can’t help but keep returning.

• Sofia Montebello 

Amy Nelson
Educated Woman
Independent 

Amy Nelson’s music belies her age: you’d be forgiven if you thought that she was pushing 70 and had a long, storied music career behind her. But the young Calgary native sings dark country ballads far beyond her years.

Mysterious and tragicomic, Nelson plucks away at her guitar and banjo, teasing out abject songs of sad longing from the dusty recesses of traditional country and roots music.

It’s a forgotten world brought to new light, done so well that you can’t help but buy into it, whole-heartedly. Like a murderous congress of crows and ravens, Amy Nelson lords over the harvest prairies with an unwavering, steely gaze.

• Sofia Montebello

Lucas Chaisson
Most True Thing
Independent 

Edmonton’s Lucas Chaisson is a soft-spoken guy, with a down-to-earth attitude and his trademark trucker cap and denim jacket. Like the waves of amber grass that blanket the prairies he calls home, he rustles in the wind with a quiet confidence.

On Most True Thing, he digs into his own life for the stories that unfold on each of the slow-burning nine tracks, his delicate voice nestled nicely overtop the growling or weeping guitars, depending on the mood.

It’s perhaps his strongest effort yet, a gem of a roots album that punches well above its class.

• Sofia Montebello