Absent Sounds Archive

Full transcript here . Catch a new episode live every week on CJAM 99.1FM (Windsor/Detroit) and Met Radio (Toronto) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cam Kahin’s debut album CHUG arrived before he knew he was making an album: a handful of songs written in a sad-boy-stoner haze, then a title that means keep going, no matter how hard it gets. We walk through it track by track. Cam talks about leaving Dunnville for Toronto, a feature recorded across a language barrier, why compliments never stick, the ethics of posting online, and the finished sec...

When A Welcome Kind of Weakness (Runnner’s sophomore album) came out, it carried all the restlessness of its writing: songs imagined while stuck in bed, unable to move. A year later, is the welcome mat still out? This week, Noah Weinman takes us through the record, we talk the limits of naming things, being halfway home at 2:30 a.m., re-recording old songs, and the LA house where it all began. Rea...

Emily Steinwall's sophomore album, But, there's beauty in the fall from Grace , runs almost an hour and weaves between grungy art-rock edges and orchestral ballads that ask you to sit down and listen. In this conversation, we talk about how suffering and beauty are not opposites, the meaning behind "No One Wins a War," and the long-winded road to finishing this record. This episo...

Grady Allen of Anxious joins us on a warm afternoon in Riverdale Park before their show to talk through Bambi , the band's energetic, gripping, and deliciously expansive 2025 record. We get into optimism versus cynicism, the shame we carry and try to drown, our collective quarter-life crises and being the villain of your own story. Catch them on the last few dates in their tour this week Sep 3...

We are hours away from the last day of summer. Outside, the cicadas are dying, but they seem to have taken up a new home racketing around inside my brain. Dealing with clogged ear canals and a surge of internal tinnitus has made me feel that my universe will never truly be quiet. On this episode of Absent Sounds , we explore how Josaleigh manages to capture that external noise, machines, and physi...

With a voice as sweet as a cherry and jagged layers of guitar ruptures that could pick you up and throw you across a room, Cherry Pick finds us in the incessant unravellings of anxious thoughts, disappointment, and the muddiness of it all. When it comes to artists pushing the scene forward on the west coast, it's hard to miss Cherry Pick. Cherry Pick is a Vancouver based grungy shimmering project...

Today's episode finds us mid-brunch, mid-tour with youbet — Nick Llobet and Micah Prussack, joined by Jolie Gordon and Adam Berkowitz — walking through their self-titled record from top to bottom. It's been a whirlwind year for the band, so we dive into how it reshaped and untangled them while writing the record, living "Undefined," and the riff they stole from a cut track to close the whole...

Jed Arbour is a force to be reckoned with. We caught them in Calgary during Sled Island, a day after they played a set concussed — bucked in the face by their neighbour's horse, yet soaking in the magic from their favourite festival of the year. Jed talks about their work as a therapist and what it means to walk toward pain instead of around it, moving to an unincorporated hamlet in BC, the naming...

Today on Absent Sounds we're talking to Salami Rose Joe Louis — the project of Lindsay Olsen — at Sled Island, playing through her 2025 record, Lorings. If you know her earlier work, Lorings might catch you off guard compared to her previous albums built on elaborate concepts and world-building, Lorings strips it all back into something closer, quieter, journal-like between the middle of a couple...

We caught up with SamWoy — the project of Juno-winning musician and producer Sam Woywitka (Half Moon Run, Patrick Watson, Teke Teke, Luca Fogale) — at Sled Island in Calgary, where he was in town for two sets — one at Dandy Brewing, one at midnight at the Legion — off the back of his sophomore album, Even Sad Boys Like To Have Fun. SamWoy is an enigma, that became more layered with each minute spe...

In today's episode of Absent Sounds, we sit down with jc, the brain behind the beast that is friends&, to talk through folx. It's the 2026 record from the Toronto collective sprawling 112-tracks, and eight years in the making. We get into the terminally-online roots of the project, the genre term "laptop twee," what it means to let a track live it's full absurdity, the file-management discipli...

Greg Mendez's Beauty Land circles back to the same place again and again: forgiveness, offered and asked for, like a practice. This week on Absent Sounds, we sat down with Greg on the grass outside of the Sound Garage to talk about being a friend, the strange comfort of graveyards and hospitals, the difference between loving someone and loving them selfishly, and what tricks are still left to pull...

It has been a long time coming for Hikes to release new music. In every way, Winnower finds them stripped down to the truest version of themselves — built around the folk practice of separating grain from chaff. It's a record that lives in a meditative space where questions of belonging, of place, and of vulnerability slowly come into focus. This week, Nay and Chris of Hikes walk us through Winnow...

One of our favourite albums of 2026 was released only 16 days into the year. 6 months in and we're still just as captivated by it as the day we first listened. That album was Shaking Hand by Shaking hand and this week we're joined by the band as we talk through the record track by track. A shaking hands doesn't mean losing control and the Manchester-based band proves it on the debut album that dri...

This week, we have finally reached the end! The final Treefort episode aired with bands: Bonnie Trash (Emmalia + Sarafina) and Heaven for Real (Mark Grundy + J. Scott Grundy). Despite sitting on different sonic registers, both find themselves reckoning with what music holds — between trust, grief, fatherhood, and making art in between. Bonnie Trash's record Mourning You felt like the answer to wha...

Back in March we asked 10 artists at Treefort Music Fest 2026 some version of the same question: what question their music was trying to answer right now. This is the 3rd of four episodes. Three artists, without knowing the others had done the same thing, were circling this one: What does it cost to let yourself be seen? What gets made in the space between hiding and arriving, and while even when...

Taupe is a shimmering four-piece from Montreal whose debut record New Window arrived this spring. We caught up with Andrew Miller, Heather Ogilvie, Jess Barry, and Evan Magoni before their show at the Cameron House, during one of the first warm Toronto afternoons to talk about the multitude of pieces tucked into this record. It feels like a free association conversation of thought, from Cosmic Cri...

Sometimes you go into a project trying to make sense of something and come out with a better sense of what you're trying to make sense of. This is the second of four episodes Absent Sounds made at Treefort Music Fest in March 2026 — a docuseries built from ten artist interviews done over five days in Idaho. Each episode weaves between voices, asking some version of the same question: what is your...

There is a banner plane making loops over downtown Boise, as we showed up to record this episode. It says USA LOVES TRUMP. Below it, Treefort music festival is happening. This is the first of four episodes Absent Sounds made at the fest in March 2026 — a docuseries built from ten artist interviews done over five days in Idaho. Each episode weaves between voices, asking some version of the same que...

In today's episode of Absent Sounds, we sit with Alice Gerlach: also known as alice does computer music. Her latest record, Bliss , is four ten-minute electroacoustic compositions assembled from cello improvisations, field recordings, and mementos of a life being lived. The record places you in a lush disorienting world full of frog ponds and wind chimes, chopped vocals, leftover audio from tour s...

On this episode of Absent Sounds, Will Wiesenfeld (Baths) sat across from us at a coffee shop in Toronto, hours before his show at Lee's Palace. We talked about Cerulean R, his expanded reissue of the 2010 debut that launched his career, in full. What makes Cerulean R different from most reissues is its integrity to that era: every piece of it, from the unreleased tracks, the remixes, the demos, r...

In today's episode of Absent Sounds, we sit with Alex and the world he built as Tōth. His latest record, And the Voice Said has been a compass for me these past few months- it imposes no answers on listeners, but pulls you into the space needed to hear truth behind the noise. Almost like a mirror. Also! Tucked in the episode: a live rendition of a surprise song from the record, performed by Alex a...

TThis week, Sara Mae joins Absent Sounds for a track-by-track dive into the deluxe edition of their debut album: The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat. Under The Noisy, Sara Mae Henke (they/them) makes music for closing chapters that also loudly opens a door. We talk about the pipeline between poetry and songwriting, from the volta, to queer wordplay and the love-soaked specificity of "Ballerino...

Twen are Jane Fitzsimmons and Ian Jones rock duo who have spent the better part of a decade booking their own tours out of a converted van. You can feel their fiercely independent method permeating each riff: they write, engineer, and mix everything themselves. Fate Euphoric, their 2025 album, is the one we kept returning to on our daily drives without getting tired. Sprawling across garage rock,...