10 albums and EPs from Halifax artists you need to listen to this year

In this streaming era of music, it’s hard to keep tabs on everything. When 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify, YouTube and other platforms every day, how can anyone find the must-listen amid the mediocre? The truly stellar among the stale? The original among the old news? Count yourself lucky in two respects: As ever, Halifax’s music scene keeps punching above its weight, and as surely as you’ll find a line outside the Seahorse on a Saturday night, The Coast is here to help you narrow your sonic search.

From new rap records by Halifax hip hop stalwarts Quake Matthews and Classified to punk rock offerings from Customer Service and Steel Cut Oats to synth-pop, reggae and everything in between, there’s been something for everyone in 2024.

Here, we count down 10 of the best local offerings of the year, in the order they were released:

1 Quake Matthews, Roses (February 14, Myth Music)
Bar for bar, nobody in Halifax is outrapping Quake. The Fairview-raised emcee has been putting out record after record since 2010’s The Myth, winning fans out of the likes of Freeway, The Wake Up Show’s Sway Calloway and Cypress Hill’s B-Real—the latter of whom just joined Quake on the mic for a surprise remix. On the 14-track Roses, Quake raps that he’s spitting “like the rent’s due,” and the proof is in the pudding: The 35-year-old shines brightest on the introspective “Learn As I Go” and “Let The Boy Die,” while friend and frequent collaborator JRDN drops a heater of a verse on the chest-puffed-out “Where I’m At.”

2 Customer Service, Live More Forever EP (February 23, Stuff Works Out)
If you’re a fan of catchy melodies, power chords, 2000s pop-punk nostalgia and unapologetically wordy song titles, you’ll be right at home listening to Customer Service’s debut EP. The Halifax band—drummer Owen Harris, lead vocalist Matt Cheverie, guitarist Max Hayden and bassist Nick Adams—have been making waves since premiering their first-ever music video in January, catching the ear of Exclaim! and touring across Canada. Dip your toes into the five-track EP with the head-banging lead single “Grad Day,” or jump right into the party with “Working Hard or Riley Workman?,” a cheeky nod to a Dal varsity soccer player that could only be made in Halifax.

3 Classified, Luke’s View (April 26, HalfLife Records)
Nearly 30 years since Luke Boyd broke onto the music scene with the self-released Time’s Up, Kid, and after a career that has brought a JUNO Award, collaborations with rap idols Snoop Dogg and Raekwon and a bestselling book, to boot, the Enfield emcee better known as Classified still has something to say. On the 11-track Luke’s View, he offers more than enough of the old Class—and the new one—to satisfy fans new and old, whether teaming up with Juice Crew rapper Masta Ace for the trap-inspired “Sure Enough” or reuniting with brother Mike Boyd for the playful, punchline-filled “The Hardy Boys.” The album’s most poignant moment comes with its closer, “Wonder,” which sees Classified open up about a miscarriage he and his wife went through.

“The amount of people that even asked me about that line—it’s just obviously something a lot of people have gone through in life,” he tells The Coast, “and it was just one of those things … that [was] important for me to kind of get off my chest.”

It’s a mark of Boyd’s comfort in his own skin that he offers it up on the record—and it’s in these snapshots of vulnerability that Luke’s View shines most.

4 Alana Yorke, Destroyer (May 17, Paper Bag Records)
Yorke does not rush as a musician. In a streaming era that is always hungry for a new EP, a new music video, a new single, she and her husband, Ian Bent—who has co-produced both of Yorke’s albums—took eight years to craft and finish what would become Destroyer. That’s a byproduct of her rigorous attention to detail—the album includes a 21-piece orchestra, for one—but also the consequence of a COVID-19 pandemic and Yorke suffering a stroke.

At the time, the album was mixed but not yet mastered—“so close to the finish line,” Yorke tells The Coast. “It was very, very heavy; very, very challenging … When I had my stroke, I felt like I lost myself.”

The stroke recovery gave Yorke’s album a new focus, along with a new name: Destroyer. The end result is layered; cinematic. Yorke’s voice haunts as much as it stirs the heart.

5 Eliza Rhinelander, Good Old Days EP (May 22, SGB Records)
“Why does love have different names in different lands, if it’s all the same?” Rhinelander sings in her debut EP’s opener, “When in Rome.” The 19-year-old singer-songwriter crowdfunded the release of her six-track EP, recorded and produced in friend Silas Bonnell’s home studio. At a shade over 22 minutes long, it’s a breezy listen and brimming with potential. Rhinelander has a clear voice and an ear for storytelling: Her song “August 13, 1998” is about the end of the AIDS epidemic, on a day when the Bay Area Reporter published no obituaries for the first time in years. The young country/folk artist has plans for 2025, too—starting with a new album, The Precipice, and a release party at The Carleton on Feb 9.

6 Mat Elliott, South Endings EP (May 24, West Street Records)
Take the laid-back, bassline-riding funk of Tom Misch and sprinkle in a little psychedelic dreamwave for good measure: That’s the feeling you’ll get from Mat Elliott’s South Endings opener, “Two Years.” A project Elliott describes to The Coast as “a lot of stuff in my head that was just kind of rolling around in there,” the five-track EP sees the Truro-raised artist reflect on “a couple of hard breakups” while experimenting with guitar grooves, dreamy synth solos and piano arrangements that’ll pluck you out of a Halifax winter and onto the outer rings of Neptune. (Think Still Woozy’s offbeat charm, with a touch more pop.)

Mat Elliott released his debut EP ‘South Endings’ after two successful singles earlier this year, “Two Years” and “Church Street”. Credit: Megan Tansey Witton / Krystal Penney

From the irresistible “Ten” to the EP’s closer, “Church Street,” Elliott’s emotional revelations are underpinned by synth-pop soundscapes that he describes as “little environments,” heavily influenced by acts like Tame Impala, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Surfaces. Aiding him on the album is ECMA-nominated mixing engineer John Mullane (Future Dad) and two-time Juno award-winning mastering engineer Kristian Montano.

7 Steel Cut Oats, Top Autonomy EP (June 8, Noodle Cat)
Two years since the five-piece “angry girl rock” band claimed gold honours for Best New Band in The Coast’s Best of Halifax Readers Choice Awards, Steel Cut Oats is back with a four-track EP that rattles in your chest like a kick drum and hits your frontal lobe like a strong cup of black coffee. Bandmates Sarah Roberts, Emma Laffoley, Sophie Janke, Jo Koechling and Ted Morris started the band as a gag after a camping trip—“We were just canoeing down a lake being like ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we started a band?’” Roberts told The Coast in 2022. “We went back the next week and went, ‘Okay, I guess we’re going to make music now.’” It worked: The fivesome started gigging around Halifax, drawing comparisons to Irish rockers The Cranberries and “slop pop” duo Diet Cig.

On Top Autonomy, Steel Cut Oats combine sharp songwriting with steady riffs and a propulsive energy that keeps the EP moving breathlessly, from the metronomic “Waiting For You” to the bite-filled “Professional Disrespect.”

“Most of [the songs] are trying to make light of difficult or heavy topics that young women go through in their 20s,” Roberts told The Coast earlier this year. “Typical things like relationships, bad jobs, bad relationships, and things like that.”

8 Jah’Mila, Woman of the Sun (June 21, Wharf Records)
Take a sonic trip from Halifax to Kingston, Jamaica, with reggae singer-songwriter Jah’Mila’s latest full-length offering. The 11-track Woman of the Sun sees the Juno-nominated songstress on her usual mic-controlling game, whether linking up with Maritimers Wolf Castle, Wendy MacIsaac and Aquakultre on the hip hop/reggae crossover “East Coast Family” or enlisting St. Lucian-turned-Haligonian Kayo for the groovy, rum-drenched duet “Bad Habit.” “I want to see the people dance again,” she sings on “Reggae Nuh Dead.” Mission accomplished.

9 Dog Day, A T-Shirt with Writing on It (July 26, Fundog Recordings)
“It’s all heavy stuff,” Dog Day’s lead singer, Seth Smith, says of his band’s newest record. “But also, you know, we try not to take anything too seriously. [We] try to be playful with the lyrics and [the] music; we like to have walked up balances, meaning and meaningless, because it’s all just a joke at the end of the day.”

The Halifax indie-rock band’s first-full length record of new material since 2020’s Present is many things: Noisy, moody, cathartic and lively. It’s also the band’s first album without keyboards, Smith told The Coast in August: “[It] made things a little simpler, and I guess I could focus a little more on, you know, guitar tones and noise, which is kind of interesting, because when you have a lot of instruments, they all kind of compete for the mix.

“I really like keyboards. They smooth things out a lot, and they’re very beautiful and haunting, but there’s a starkness with bass and guitar that’s kind of striking and kind of fun.”

10 Joel Plaskett, One Real Reveal (September 13, turtlemusik)
Dartmouth’s favourite folk-rocker went back to basics on his eleventh solo album. On One Real Reveal, Plaskett recorded everything on a four-track cassette machine with a single microphone.

“Once you have a limitation like that, it sort of helps you rein in the arrangements, but you can’t bury them,” he told The Coast in May. “Sometimes it’s almost easier to add than it is to subtract, or to leave it be and be happy with it when you’re used to hearing things that are more fully arranged.”

Plaskett’s newest album leaves little doubt why Haligonians keep voting him Best Songwriter in The Coast’s annual Best of Halifax awards: At 49 years old, he doesn’t need loud guitars or heavy drums to be heard, and his pen has sharpened over the years, whether writing folksy, Dylan-esque tunes about guests who overstay their welcome (“Rainy Day Janey”) or spoken-word pieces about aging and self-discovery (“The New Joys”).

“It’s a quiet record, so I’m hoping it will resonate with people who are in that headspace,” said Plaskett of One Real Reveal. “I love playing rock and roll and I got some of those shows for the summer on the horizon, and other material cooking on the back burner for things down the line, but this record is kind of folksy in minimal ways. It’s sort of what feels right for me at this kind of junction.”

—With files from Brendyn Creamer and Morgan Mullin