Haley Blais' forthcomingsophomore album effort Wisecrack is concerned with conscience, morality, and the superego. It’s “bleak but true,” as Haley puts it. “Am I a good person or not? Are we all doing okay? Am I a good daughter? Sister? Partner? Friend?” Haley's new album is more mature, confessional, focused, and darker than anything she has yet produced. The existential, everyday worries we all contain but rarely share are laid bare across 11 songs exquisitely performed with profundity, grace, and humor. All of Wisecrack is textured and wryly poetic, somewhere between childhood memory and the creation of a new self.

Six years in the making with sixty plus songs in the running, Hayden's ninth record Are We Good is a crowning achievement in the born storyteller's loaded canon. The album posits Hayden, grizzled and peppered, by the pandemic or parenting, in an attic studio stand-off with writer's block. Written, produced, and mixed predominantly at Skyscraper National Park, the studio at the top of his Toronto home, a perfect combination of complex family life – Hayden and his wife are parents to a child with developmental disabilities – and the grinding halt of creative inertia forced Hayden further out of his comfort zone than ever before, taking the album off its ledge of unachievable perfection. Hayden reached out to Matt Berninger of The National, a friend and creative catalyst with whom he has traded ideas for years.