20 Canadian albums we can’t wait to hear in 2026

A new year means new music, and this one is cropping up to be one for the books.

Whether you've been waiting with bated breath for Drake's return, you want to discover the next great Canadian singer-songwriter or you're looking for music that speaks to the turbulent times we're living in, 2026 has something for you.

Scroll below to see CBC Music's most anticipated albums and EPs of the year.

Artist: Baby Nova
Album name: Shhugar
Release date: Jan. 16

Baby Nova’s debut album, Shhugar, is a long time coming. The Halifax-born singer-songwriter, née Kayleigh O’Connor, has been making music since she was 12 and signed her first licensing deal at 16. After 15 years of ups and downs, record deals and binding contracts that amounted to very little, O’Connor was almost ready to put down her pen. In an interview with iHeartRadio, she mentions overcoming a “quarter-life crisis” to realize giving up on music just wasn’t in her cards. The first single off Shhugar, Killed for Sport, was written soon after. The record is at once a reclamation of her personal narrative and a “sexual awakening” for the singer. Catholicism and questions of purity, sin and repentance are motifs that crop up throughout, and O’Connor swears like a trucker as she contemplates it all. 

Forthright songwriting abounds on Shhugar, but the stirring Great White Sharks is the album’s clearest statement, as O’Connor drawls: “I survived but I wasn’t stronger for it/ just broke down and cried/ on the corner of Beverley and Queen.” She wrote the song after checking herself in for a psychiatric emergency in Toronto, while dealing with “the worst depression I’d ever had in my life.” Her diaristic storytelling and songs about booze-filled memories and weathering the vitriol of difficult, broken men have garnered comparisons to Lana Del Rey, but that isn't the only singer O’Connor pulled inspiration from for Shhugar: she lists Dusty Springfield, Kate Bush and Johnny Cash’s “dark country vibes” as influences as she fleshed out its sonic world. O’Connor worked closely with Lowell (the Beaches, Beyoncé) and Gus van Go (Metric, Arkells) while writing and producing Shhugar, and it’s simultaneously brimming with hooky melodies and some of the most eviscerating lyricism I’ve heard in years — which is to say, it’s a certifiable gem. — Kelsey Adams

Artist: Katie Tupper
Album name: Greyhound
Release date: Jan. 21

Soul singer Katie Tupper has a gift for emoting, using her full-bodied vocals to convey vanishing and finding oneself within the throes of romance. From the beginning of Greyhound opener Disappear, Tupper’s voice clasps listeners tightly: “The more you try to love me, the more I disappear,” she sings. Previous singles Tennessee Heat, Jeans (fall on my knees), Safe Ground and Right Hand Man were appetizers, as the rest of her debut album expands upon their candour and flows into gentle moments (“Sweet like peach skin,” she sings on Whitney) while still traversing the sultry (Cowboy Lullaby) and the stomach-sinking pit of heartbreak (Round and Round). Her pen consistently captures the fluttering jitters of crushes (“I think about you all the time/ it’s about to do my head in,” she sings on the R&B slow burner Sick to My Stomach), digging into how love acts as a connective tissue. Although soul and R&B lovers will latch on to Tupper’s songs with ease, country/folk fans and those who simply appreciate incisive lyricism will appreciate the nods to her Prairie upbringing, too. With no skips, there’s something for everyone. — Natalie Harmsen

Artist: Aquakultre
Album name: 1783
Release date: Feb. 6

It can take years to create an album, but 1783 is multiple lifetimes in the making. Lance Sampson, a.k.a. Aquakultre, realized after his daughter was born that he couldn’t tell her much about their family because he didn’t know it himself. It took years of digging for Sampson to trace his family back to the Black Loyalists arriving in Nova Scotia in 1783 — and this album, named after that moment, is the stunning culmination of his research. Leaning into soul, R&B, blues and gospel, 1783 is a powerful concept album, filled with vulnerable moments and hard questions. The gorgeous, horn-backed What Are You Sayin’ takes its name from the phrase Sampson heard growing up in Overtown, or Uniacke Square, asking, “What are you doing?” “How are you doing?” “Where are you going?” simultaneously, and all the ways he wasn’t sure how to answer them. Gallows is the haunting story of his great grandfather Daniel Perry Sampson, the last person to be executed in Halifax under the death penalty. “City don't give a goddamn 'bout a Black boy like me,” Sampson sings, damningly, getting to the heart of the “miscarriage of justice” he later details against his ancestor. Produced by Erin Costelo and featuring the talents of Linda Carvery, Micah and Haliey Smith, Gary Beals, and the Sanctified Brothers, 1783 marks Aquakultre’s third studio album — and the album of his lifetime. — Holly Gordon

Artist: Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Album name: Laughter in Summer
Release date: Feb. 6

When Beverley Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 new-age work Keyboard Fantasies was rediscovered in 2015 by a Japanese record collector, it launched the then 77-year-old into the spotlight for the first time. A decade later, and a year after revealing a dementia diagnosis, the musician and former Mr. Dressup actor is introducing us to a more intimate side of himself: the one he shares with wife Elizabeth Copeland. Laughter in Summer is an album the couple made together, capturing a love they have shared for nearly 20 years, and a story that started much earlier. The two met long before their romantic relationship started, when Elizabeth started inviting Glenn to be part of the theatre shows she was producing, collaborating on work that would become fundamental to Glenn’s art — just as Elizabeth now is to his life. The title track to the album began when Glenn started composing instrumentals as his cognitive impairment advanced. “It was a very painful time,” Elizabeth recalled in the album biography. “Because I was so aware of just how much of my sweetheart I was losing.” Glenn played one of his instrumentals for Elizabeth, and as they sat by a lake together listening to loons, lyrics came to her: “Laughter in summer, how I remember; my life, my joy, on Earth, here, with you.” To watch them perform it together, above, is to be let into something almost too private: a love that no longer needs words to define it. — HG

Artist: Daphni
Album name: Butterfly
Release date: Feb. 6

Dan Snaith is almost always working on something. When he’s not busy releasing music as Caribou or Daphni, he’s collaborating with fellow electronic powerhouses like Sofia Kourtesis and Fred Again… On Feb. 6, Snaith brings his focus back to Daphni with Butterfly, an album of kinetic dancefloor numbers primarily built for his DJ sets. There’s also a first on Butterfly: a meeting of Snaith’s two monikers, as Daphni and Caribou come together on the cowbell and handclap-driven Waiting So Long. In a statement, Snaith explains that the difference between the two is that he’s never sung on a Daphni track, which is where Caribou comes in. The track, which started as an instrumental, quickly evolved: “The lyric and the melody came to me as I was working on it and I just recorded it without thinking too much about it ... it was the first time that I’ve had the sense that a track belonged to both aliases — like Daphni had sampled a Caribou vocal or something like that.” — Melody Lau

Artist: Boy Golden
Album name: Best of Our Possible Lives
Release date: Feb. 13

Best of Our Possible Lives finds Manitoba's Boy Golden in the middle of a quest for self-discovery:  he doesn’t yet have all the answers, but the album stirs up many questions about how to live in the world as it is. As Boy Golden mines the depths of his mind for truth, our favourite “country outlier” also expands his sonic horizons, bringing in the blues rock of the Tulsa sound, the swampy warmth of New Orleans folk and the influences of mk.gee, MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee’s songwriting styles. He recorded the album in Los Angeles with producer Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Bahamas) and a group of musicians that included Pino Palladino (D’Angelo), Gabe Noel (Father John Misty), Cat Clyde and his longtime collaborators Fontine and Austin Parachoniak. The first single and album opener, Suffer, is the thesis of the record: it lays out the plight of the everyday person, from struggling with the cost of living to substance abuse to the spread of misinformation. Boy Golden wrote the song at a time when his ideals "were being tested and shattered by the world around him,” but on the album he finds hope in prioritizing honesty, love and self-reflection. — KA

Artist: Pony
Album name: Clearly Cursed
Release date: Feb. 13

When Pony singer Sam Bielanski was 21, she went to a psychic, who warned her that she had a dark spirit attachment. The psychic could vanquish this spirit, but for the price of $1,500. “That was obviously out of my budget,” she said in a statement, “so I left and decided I would have to coexist with this dark spirit for the rest of my life.” While songs off the band’s upcoming album, Clearly Cursed, deal with dark subjects and emotions including jealousy (Superglue), toxic friendships (Every Little Crumb) and pet loss (Middle of Summer), Bielanski and her band always deliver it through bright, ebullient pop-rock melodies. There’s an evident '90s influence behind the fuzzed-out guitars, which feel tailormade for a high-school movie of that era, but its power-pop fervour is also the exact type of energy we need heading into a brand new year. May we all exorcise our cursed feelings through such cheerful, singalong-worthy anthems. — ML

Artist: Dominique Fils-Aimé
Album name: My World Is the Sun
Release date: Feb. 20

Always one to be inspired by the environment, jazz/soul singer Dominique Fils-Aimé knots together the untamed sounds of waves and wind, capturing the wild hum of nature on My World Is the Sun, her newest album since 2023’s Our Roots Run Deep. It’s a project that toys with visual lyrics, and as she sings “the sun on my skin glowing,” you can envision warmth and luminescence as the track progresses, galloping along over repeating ooohs. Fils-Aimé stretches herself across sounds on the project: Echappée Belle has a slow groove that slips and slides, while The Waves flows over breathy incantations and Freedom Become sways with a bossa nova-ish flutter. It’s a meticulously crafted effort that succeeds in surfacing Fils-Aimé’s inner monologue while also transporting listeners to the great outdoors. — NH

Artist: Peaches
Album name: No Lube, So Rude
Release date: Feb. 20

Peaches has never shied away from being unabashedly herself and standing up for what she believes in — and more than 25 years into her career, she’s still not backing down. No Lube, So Rude is her first album in over a decade, and it’s the rallying cry we need right now. “Now more than ever, there are so many forces that just want you to give up and be quiet,” Peaches said in a statement. “If this album can help you resist that, then that’s what it’s for.” Lead single Not In Your Mouth, None of Your Business offers a brazen motto aimed at those who police other people’s bodies and identities. “I cannot be squashed or minimized,” Peaches says on the track’s opening moments. “You will never take away our pride.” These are chants that we can take from the club to the streets, empowering us to take up space, be ourselves and fight back. — ML

Artist: Jenn Grant
Album name: Queen of the Strait
Release date: March 6

After releasing 2023’s collaborative album of duets, Champagne Problems, Jenn Grant is looking inward for her ninth studio release, Queen of the Strait. “It’s a tribute to my ancestors and a warm blanket for you like a colourful magical quilt,” Grant shared via press release. “Sometimes funny and quirky, then dark and dreamy.” The title strait is the Northumberland, which divides Prince Edward Island from the rest of the Maritimes, and which Grant and her brother travelled over often after her parents separated and her mother built them a new life off the island. The lead single, Jim Cuddy’s Dress, is a dedication to Grant’s late mother, and the story of when they first met Jim Cuddy, who is now, 14 years later, a close friend of Grant’s. The only single from the record so far, Jim Cuddy’s Dress uses pop-country and horn flourishes to pull happy memories from an impossibly heavy time, just weeks before Grant’s mom passed away. Queen of the Strait beautifully connects these disparate threads — joy, grief, history and healing — for an album that is celebratory while not burying any truths. “But what the world needs now is love/ and it only comes from freedom,” Grant sings on standout Seaglass, which vividly paints a home that holds complicated memories. It’s a pair of lines to hold onto in 2026. — HG

Artist: Status/Non-Status
Album name: Big Changes
Release date: March 6

Adam Sturgeon and co. are back with an album centred on family. After building a home studio in London, Ont., and having recording sessions there on Monday mornings, Big Changes emerged amid Sturgeon’s “routine of caring for my young family in a disintegrating and tough city,” he shared in a press release. The first single, At All, blends reverberating guitar with observations about the daily hustle. “How you dreamin’ when you not sleeping at all?” Sturgeon sings. “I was starting to feel really disillusioned at the time of writing this song. Confused about the state of music and the complex world we are living in; the grind to make each day work,” he shared. “I decided to disappear, bunker down at home, stay in, write songs about it and invite my friends over to visit and play along. I wrote over 40 songs and this was one of the first to come out of me." It’s equally downcast and honest, with the lyrics setting the tone for a record that’s raw and urgent. — NH

Artist: Pup
Album name: Megacity Madness (The Official Live Recordings)
Release date: March 13

There’s beauty rooted in the determination it takes to put on an entire tour across one’s hometown. And with Pup’s Megacity Madness tour that took place last July to promote Who Will Look After the Dogs?, the punk rockers gave an infinite amount of love to Toronto in venues of increasing sizes, starting with a small house show and ending with a performance to thousands at History. It was a clever, nostalgic way of acknowledging their growth, and the live recordings from all six shows on this upcoming album will channel their exuberant spirit to bring anyone who missed out along for the wild, rambunctious ride. To make things even more classically Pup, the band is releasing the album on its own terms: it will skip streaming platforms and be exclusively on vinyl, available at indie retailers and on the group’s website. — NH

Artist: Drake
Album name: Iceman
Release date: winter 

Drake has been teasing his official ninth solo album, Iceman, since August 2024. That may be a long time in the music world, but for those keeping score, it’s on par with the two-year-long period fans waited for Drake to release Views, an album he first announced in 2014 and released in 2016. The difference is that for Iceman, the stakes couldn’t be higher: with Views, Drake, already on top, was looking to cement his legacy; with Iceman, he’s looking to reclaim it. Based on early singles like What Did I Miss?, it's clear Drake is still focused on the 2024 rap civil war with Kendrick Lamar and friends, particularly on those he feels turned on him: “Askin' me, 'How did it feel?' Can't say it didn't surprise me,” he raps. “Last time I looked to my right, you n----s was standing beside me.” Other singles include Which One, featuring Central Cee, and Dog House, featuring Yeat and Julia Wolf, with rumoured production credits from Drake mainstays like Gordo and Boi-1da, but also Tay Keith and Conductor, two producers who have been known to bring out the best in Drake. — Jesse Kinos-Goodin

Artist: Wintersleep
Album name: Wishing Moon
Release date: March 27

Nothing can break us,
There’s nothing to break us.

Paul Murphy’s voice stretches out defiantly at the midpoint in Stranger Now, Wintersleep’s latest single, exposing a central belief within the Halifax rock band’s upcoming and eighth studio album. Wishing Moon, out March 27, marks Wintersleep’s return after seven years, and the reunion of the full five-piece: lead singer and guitarist Murphy, guitarist Tim D’Eon, keyboardist Jon Samuel, drummer Loel Campbell and bassist Chris Bell. Wintersleep teamed up with French producer Nicolas Vernhes (the War on Drugs, Spoon) for the first time, at his studio in the Mojave Desert, to create Wishing Moon, which challenged the now 25-year-old band in just the right ways. “We needed that energy of not knowing,” Murphy explained via press release. “I remember thinking that it should be uncomfortable, because it’s like getting in touch with who you are again, individually and as a group…. I think of collaboration with producers as a mirror, and felt especially in this case, it revealed a lot. Most importantly, I think Wishing Moon just has this living, breathing quality.” Judging by what the band has dropped so far — the familiar fuzz of I Got a Feeling; the distinct harmonies and riffs of Stranger Now — Wintersleep found exactly what it needed. — HG

Artist: Kyle Wildfern
Album name: Stolen George EP
Release date: April 10

Kyle Wildfern’s upcoming EP, Stolen George, is quite the departure from the eclectic musings and sonic wanderings of his debut album What a Life. The first single off the new project, Muscle, is out Feb. 9 and it’s Atlanta trap meets New York drill, with Wildfern at his most braggadocious. The entire EP is full of high-energy, unabashed fun, the production reminiscent of late 2000s LimeWire era hip-hop. Stolen George is a return to Wildfern’s rap roots and with each track clocking in at two minutes and 30 seconds or less, it’s an offering of bite-sized treats that pack a punch. Wildfern is bold and boastful on Do Re Mi (“I wanna be like me when I’m older”) and humorous and cheeky on Hannah Montana ("I got two girls/ Hannah Montana/ They’re the best of both worlds”).  

Artist: Rae Spoon
Album name: Assigned Country Singer at Birth
Release date: April 10

When Rae Spoon dropped two country covers last year — a reclamation of Garth Brooks’s I’ve Got Friends in Low Places and a full-on transformation of Charli XCX’s Apple — we were hoping for more to come. Thankfully, Spoon is fully returning to their country roots with the just-announced album Assigned Country Singer at Birth, out April 10. “The album is equally subversive and relatable, a testament to the fact that country music is as expansive as the people who are connected to it,” reads the press release, with the promise of songs about “trans folks, harm reduction, disability, inclusion, religious trauma, solidarity and opposing colonial land occupation,” a stretching of the country canon that we desperately need. Collaborators include producer and drummer Alaska B, Pantayo, and vocalists Lydia Persaud, Kimmortal, Stewart Legere and Cassia Hardy, whose voice laces Spoon’s on lead single Can’t Fail Me. Atop Christine Bougie’s pedal steel, Spoon stands strong with Hardy’s support: “We may not have long, but this is my shot/ and you can’t fail me ’cause I have no plan/ death’s already come and it’ll be back,” they sing, ever more poignant given Spoon’s past cancer diagnosis and treatment. “I view my survival as a responsibility to keep trying to make pathways easier for people who have a more difficult time,” they said. — HG

Artist: Adria Kain
Album name: Feels Like Home
Release date: summer

It's been four years since Adria Kain’s last album, When Flowers Bloom, and the Toronto R&B singer has done much soul-searching in the interim. Ahead of the release of her upcoming album, Feels Like Home, Kain has been hosting listening parties around the world as a means of taking back control and sharing the record on “my own terms instead of waiting for the industry to tell me when.” On Instagram, she shared that in the leadup to her previous album, she felt “exhausted and disconnected in ways I couldn’t fully name yet. I had worked toward that moment for years, but instead of feeling grounded and excited, everything felt rushed and unclear.” Across events in Toronto, Mexico City and the south of France, Kain created different lived-in experiences that played with the idea of “home,” and how it exists not only in places, but also in people. Feels Like Home is a collection of eight songs that expand on this idea in different ways, from finding home inside yourself on Right Where You Left Me (“What am I if I don’t come back to me?/ Lately I feel the things I couldn’t see”) to letting others find home within you on Driving Miss Daisy (“Open your heart and let me in love/ show me the parts that you’re afraid of”). — KA

Rumoured releases

Artist: Charlotte Day Wilson 
Album name: Patchwork
Release date: TBA

On Charlotte Day Wilson’s upcoming project, Patchwork, the soul singer is chasing imperfection. At a listening party in Toronto in December, she passed out vinyls of the record that had been pressed before the songs had been finished or fully mixed and mastered, wanting to bring listeners into the music-making process. Patchwork follows 2024’s Juno- and Grammy-nominated Cyan Blue, and from what we’ve heard, it’s Wilson at her most exploratory. The release date is still unknown, but early singles Selfish and High Road are enough to tide us over. — KA

Artist: Garçons
Album name: TBA
Release date: fall

Toronto/Ottawa duo Garçons are returning with new music for the first time in more than four years this fall. Their upcoming album follows 2019’s Be Human, and the 2021 standalone single Like Water. Deelo Avery (singer-songwriter) and Julian Strangelove (producer) are known for their expansive soundscapes, and on previous releases they’ve dipped in and out of funk, psychedelia, samba and more genres while sprinkling in a pop sheen that makes the music irresistibly catchy. — KA

Artist: Deadmau5
Album name: TBA
Release date: TBA

This year marks a new era for Deadmau5, who will return with his first full-length album in a decade. To cap off 2025, the DJ/producer gave fans a sneak peek with Ameonna, a seven-minute instrumental that steadily builds into a swirling dance anthem. In addition to that, Deadmau5 also retired his iconic cube live production and introduced a new setup at his annual Day of the Deadmau5 show, which included new lights, imagery and AI humanoid robots. With an embrace of AI and a fearlessness to experiment and grow with technology, we can’t wait to see how Deadmau5 brings that into the future of his work and music in general. — ML