Since launching NicheMTL in 2022, a number of people have asked why we don’t publish straight-up album reviews. The simple answer is that in the age of digital reproduction, when anyone can access any record at any time, there is no reason to spill ink (itself an anachronistic phrase because who actually spills ink?) describing the obvious, locating the ubiquitous.

NicheMTL functions more like an awards show in which it is an honour just to be nominated. If it is included on our website or in print, you can assume and rest assured that it is worth investigating. Like everyone, we have our favourites. But to rank them would be crass.

Tastes are unscientific. There may be aesthetic or formal criteria that inform them. But ultimately, you either like something or you don’t. Suffice to say, there is more likeable — lovable, even — made-in-Montreal culture than we have the time or resources to showcase.

Nonetheless, we try our best to create a niche to highlight some of the outstanding work that Montreal’s artists produce, a space to shed light on the underrepresented and the underground.

NicheMTL’s in-house criteria loosely fall into two categories: what is interesting and what is important. Interesting is an aesthetic, qualitative judgement, and important is a formal, ideological, and quantitative one. We love artists who make art that engages in some ongoing conversation while standing apart from it. We additionally love artists who have some kind of vital statement to make. It doesn’t have to be grand. The personal is always political.

With this in mind, we are pleased to present NicheMTL’s second annual unranked list of our favourite albums produced in Montreal over the past 12 months. And rather than the customary top ten, this year, as an obvious nod, the list goes up to 11.

Alicia Clara, Nothing Dazzled (Self-Released)

As delicate as a fawn on ice or a new love, Clara’s voice set against soft distorted guitars and dreamy acoustic shoegaze is an antidote for contemporary life’s often uncompromising cruelty.

Alicia Clara features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Fine Food Market, I’m afraid to be in love with someone who crashes their car that much (Arbutus Records)

The effervescent weightlessness of a melancholy pedal steel haunts this album of sonic still-life pop portraits and propels Sophie Perras’s youthful compositions to stratospheric heights.

Fine Food Market is spotlighted in the August 4^th, 2024, edition of Play Recent.

Nikolas L.B., Tales from the Balance Wheel (Self-Released)

The skilful songwriting and familiar harmonic vernacular of Nikolas L.B.’s recordings are modern and timeless simultaneously, both startlingly fresh and reminiscent of some distant history.

Nikolas L.B. features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Boutique Feelings, Shwaya, Shwaya (Mothland)

Recombinant plunderphonic textures characterize Karim Lakhdar’s debut solo album and revise an ambitiously progressive new musical form of hybrid Hip Hop, Funk, and Northern Touch Soul.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Karim Lakhdar.

Quinton Barnes, Black Noise (Watch that Ends the Night Records)

Barnes possesses the ability to assemble the community’s best and brightest, weaving together a tapestry of Montreal’s most innovative musicians while casting himself as the throughline.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Quinton Barnes, who performs at Système x NicheMTL 26 March 2026.

Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, Time & Place (Watch that Ends the Night Records)

Attempts to face up to our colonial history too often manifest in hollow gestures and over-planned tokenism when an improvisatory approach might prove more apropos and effective.

Egyptian Cotton Arkestra features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Jessica Moss, Unfolding (Constellation Records)

Jessica Moss trades in uneasy anticipation and mourning future loss with beautiful and troubled results that at once agitate and assuage the gnawing responsibilities of witnessing this moment.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Jessica Moss.

Nadah El Shazly, Laini Tani (Backward Music)

Encounters with strangers engender fascination and fear, neither warranted nor rational, until the exotic experience is naturalized and intwined with domesticity and accepted custom.

Nadah El Shazly is spotlighted in the March 24^th, 2024, edition of Play Recent.

Esse Ran, Off Program (Humidex Records)

The trancelike state of ecstatic dance to miniscule modulations in rhythmic repetition has long been known to insulate human subjects from corporeal corruption and vibrational decay.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Félix Gourd.

Corporation, Tableaux du doute (Danse Noir)

Directional movement animates societal change and prompts the rejection of nostalgia and hyper-static inertia, coaxing evolution into novel and unanticipated cultural territories.

Corporation features on the NicheMTL Compilation CD that accompanies our 2025 yearbook.

Orchestroll, Corrosiv (29 Speedway)

Acerbic wit is an effective strategy and has not until now been persuasively deployed to counter Leviathan control society and the Artificial Intelligence dystopia that our tech overlords proffer.

Choose life.

Read the NicheMTL interview with Orchestroll.◼︎

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NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.