Dreaming of Wanderlust - August 2026
Dreamy new sounds for sun-drenched days! ☀️
Featuring Simone White, Michael Antelope, Mara Connor, Willem James Cowan, Libby Ember, Matthew Holtby, Sébastien De Francesco, pssyclwz, Roger Greenawalt, Gabi Hartmann, Sweetbreads, Luluc, Coco Smith, ISQ, Rogan Mei, Riley Max, Scarlett Macfarlane, Eddie Skuller, Nate Northfield, and Sydney Stevenson.
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Dreaming of Wanderlust 🌿 Indie Folk · Folktronica · Chamber Pop
Simone White - Fortunately Gone
Simone White turns The Breeders' Fortunately Gone into a delicate alternative folk and classical-pop daydream, with pulsing plucked strings and bright vocal harmonies fluttering like two swallows suddenly taking flight.
A playful little escape from the noise, it arrives as a companion to her album Letter To The Last Generation, where heartache and doubt are transformed into something celestial.
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Michael Antelope - Bridge Over My Head
Press Photo by Mike Neal
Michael Antelope's gentle folk ballad finds a haunting metaphor in its title: the bridge that shelters us can also become a trap when the waters rise.
Doug McBrien and Lenny McGowan wrap that tension in close harmonies and warm guitars, creating a song that feels equally suited to a quiet porch and a long walk through the woods.
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Mara Connor - Joe
Photo credit: Schuyler Howie
Mara Connor's dreamy folk-indie Joe floats on a warm, 1960s-inspired haze, making its sharp little send-up all the sweeter. Beneath the mellotron glow and ethereal vocals, she turns the rearview mirror toward a failed romance, reminding her former "Joe" that the child he sees is really his own reflection.
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Willem James Cowan - Back to the City
Photo credit: Adam Knapper
Willem James Cowan strips indie folk down to its barest essentials: one voice, one acoustic guitar, and the strange pain of returning somewhere that no longer feels like home.
Written after a breakup and a move back to his parents' house, Back to the City turns Toronto's familiar streets into a landscape of ghosts and misplaced memories.
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Libby Ember - Gravity
Libby Ember takes the heaviness of heartbreak and gives it a pulse, pairing melancholic lyrics with brighter, more energetic indie pop. Written while hiking through Norway during a breakup, Gravity finds a kind of freedom in accepting that sometimes going down is simply gravity and that you can still keep moving.
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Matthew Holtby - Here In My Heart
Matthew Holtby's nostalgic indie rock single feels made for a warm night, an empty highway and the windows wide open. With thumping drums, warm synths and a chorus built to stick in your head, Here In My Heart holds old memories close in that little quiet place where the people we've lost never quite disappear.
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Sébastien De Francesco - Fleury Street
Photo Credit: Alexis Gervais
Sébastien De Francesco turns a final afternoon on Montreal's Fleury Street into a warm, cinematic folk-rock memory, filled with jokes, friendship and the small beauty of being together.
"Got my suitcase full of memories, I’m ready to fly" becomes less a goodbye than a reminder to leave a little light behind, even when the road is almost over.
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pssyclwz - howl feat. Amelia Antoinette
Photo Credit: Alexis Gervais
A wolf is waiting beyond the door in pssyclwz's haunting indie pop-folk howl, where fear, yearning and the ache to be loved gather beneath an almost spell-like vocal arrangement. But the song's real magic is in breaking the spell: no saviour is coming, so the wounded heart learns to howl for itself and finally remembers, I'm mine.
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Roger Greenawalt - Everything Will Be OK
Roger Greenawalt's breezy Everything Will Be OK feels like finding a little handwritten charm tucked inside an old guitar case. Bright acoustic strums and clean electric melodies carry its reassuring mantra into the morning, while You Are My Star opens a much stranger, more intimate world of eccentricity, vulnerability and songs finally stepping out of the shadows.
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Gabi Hartmann - Roll By
Photo credit: Elsa Parra
Roll By moves like moonlight across the ocean, its delicate folk, jazz, soul and world music influences surrendering to the rhythm of the tide. On La femme aux yeux de sel (Le long voyage), Gabi Hartmann’s dreamlike tale follows Salinda toward serenity, and here she learns that sometimes love must simply be allowed to roll away, like water carrying an old spell back to sea.
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Sweetbreads - Open Mic
Photo credit: Sandy Honig
Inside Sweetbreads' haunting indie-folk / alt-country Open Mic, a dingy bar becomes a strange little chapel for everyone's private obsessions, addictions and desperate attempts to escape themselves.
With ethereal instrumentation and a voice that watches without judgment, the song opens another door into Punisher of Love, due September 25, a place where pain and connection sit beside each other in the dark.
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Luluc - Wanna Get Free
Photo credit: Jason Petruccelli
Luluc's tranquil folk world gets a mischievous flicker in Wanna Get Free, where understated drums, horn stacks and Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett's harmonies turn rebellion into a dance.
Sweet Thief keeps its gaze on a world of conflict, manipulation and shiny surfaces, but this song offers its own tiny spell of liberation: put down the weapon, shake your wings, and move.
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Coco Smith - Eastchester
Photo credit: Georgie Duddy
Coco Smith's Eastchester begins with fingerpicked guitar and a breathy voice, then slowly gathers synths, percussion and a soaring folk-rock / indie-rock release around the pain of watching something slip away.
On You Won’t Get My Message but You’ll Hear It, hope keeps appearing in unexpected places; a little battered, a little wild, but still glowing underneath the melancholy.
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ISQ - On Shoulders of Giants
There's something wonderfully grounding about a song that makes you feel smaller in the best possible way. ISQ turns snowy peaks, cold air and distant stars into a meditation on the people, places and stories that carry us forward, with "standing on shoulders of giants" becoming less a grand metaphor than an admission of gratitude.
The soft alt-pop glow suits that feeling beautifully, while the song's Italian roots give it a real sense of homecoming. Taken from The Silence Is Deafening, out October 23, this feels like music for looking up at a mountain and suddenly remembering everyone who helped you get there.
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Rogan Mei - North
I love a song that makes home feel less like something you're still trying to find. North has that restless indie-folk quality, carrying the tension between movement and belonging with a warmth that never feels overly polished.
Knowing Mei went from smokejumping through some of Canada's wildest landscapes to finding his way into songwriting gives the track an intriguing extra layer. There’s a sense of someone who has spent a lot of time looking at the horizon and wondering where to land.
A beautiful chapter in the Dickies Green Plaid Jacket story.
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Riley Max - Pockets
Pockets feels like opening an old drawer and finding little pieces of your past still tucked inside. Riley Max wraps growing apart, anxiety and gratitude in gentle indie-folk warmth, and I especially love the realization at the heart of it: sometimes we don't understand what a chapter gave us until we're already standing somewhere new.
There's something wonderfully unforced about the song's emotional honesty; no dramatic grandstanding, just a young songwriter taking stock of the things and people she carries with her. A soft, thoughtful little pocket of memory.
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Scarlett Macfarlane - Ever After
Forget waiting for the fairy-tale ending. Scarlett Macfarlane wants to know what you're doing with the pages in between. Ever After brings cinematic soft-pop warmth to that idea, turning the familiar promise of happily-ever-after into something much more active: notice the moment, take the chance, make your own story.
There's sunshine in this one, but also a little wisdom underneath it, the kind that comes from realizing life isn't supposed to wait for us to arrive at some imaginary finish line. Sometimes the magic is simply being here.
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Eddie Skuller - You Can Never Hold Back Spring
There's a particular kind of beauty in hearing a Tom Waits song stripped of its familiar rough edges and allowed to breathe. Eddie Skuller's live-to-tape take on You Can Never Hold Back Spring finds the tenderness hiding beneath the grit, with accordion, warm analog textures and a vocal performance that feels intimate rather than imitative.
And that idea of spring as renewal - even after you've lost your way - gives the whole thing a pulse of hope. From the forthcoming Blind Love EP, this is Tom Waits seen through a softer window, and I rather love what's on the other side.
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Nate Northfield - For Love(To Maddy and Andrew)
This one is ridiculously sweet, and I mean that as a compliment. Written for Nate Northfield's sister and her husband, For Love takes the enormous, slightly terrifying idea of finding your person and makes it feel wonderfully human: "Love helped me hit the ground".
The indie-folk arrangement gives those words plenty of room to breathe, while "you have to choose it" lands as the song's real little heart - love isn't only something written in the stars; sometimes it's something we consciously choose, again and again.
A very lovely piece from IN-NATE.
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Sydney Stevenson - Up to Fate (The Tarot Card Song)
Up to Fate takes overthinking, romantic uncertainty, tarot cards and a living-room conversation with friends and turns them into a warm little indie folk-pop spell. There's something charmingly honest about admitting: "Maybe you're nervous, that's cool / Maybe you overthink, me too" before basically throwing your hands up and letting the universe deal the next card.
The guitars sparkle around a big, hopeful chorus, but underneath all that brightness is a very relatable truth: you can analyze love to death, but eventually you have to let life happen.
Connect with Sydney Stevenson
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About Eugenia Roditis
Eugenia's passion for music was ignited from an early age as she grew up in a family of musicians. She loves attending concerts and festivals, while constantly seeking fresh and exciting new artists across diverse genres. Eugenia joined the MusicnGear team in 2012.
Contact Eugenia Roditis at eugenia.roditis@kinkl.com
In this blog section we host new music releases, artist features and handpicked playlists by the Musicngear staff.
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