Get to know the 10 albums nominated for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize

The short list for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize has been announced, with 10 different albums competing for the $30,000 grand prize.

These 10 records were selected from a long list of 40 albums, and the prize will be handed out to the best album, based solely on artistic merit without consideration for genre, record sales or popularity, as selected by a jury.

The full short list, powered by FACTOR is below:

• Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II
• Aquakultre, 1783
• Begonia, Fantasy Life
• Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laughter In Summer
• Bibi Club, Amaro
• Charlotte Cornfield, Hurts Like Hell
• Les Louanges, Alouette!
• Peaches, No Lube So Rude
• Rochelle Jordan, Through the Wall
• Tanya Tagaq, Saputjiji

This year, there is more cross-country representation compared to the 2025 short list: Angine de Poitrine, Les Louanges and Bibi Club make up the Quebec albums, while Begonia represents Manitoba and Aquakulture is based in Nova Scotia. Tanya Tagaq is from Nunavut, while Rochelle Jordan, Peaches, Charlotte Cornfield, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland make up Ontario’s nominees.

Starting July 19, the CBC Music radio series The Ten will return for another summer. The special takes an in-depth look at each of this year’s shortlisted albums leading up to the Polaris Concert and Award Ceremony on Sept. 22.

The Ten will be hosted by Odario Williams, with episodes broadcasting each Sunday on CBC Music and CBC Listen at 6 p.m. (6:30 p.m. in NL) until Sept. 20. Listeners can tune in on the CBC Listen app on CBC Music and listen on demand after each broadcast.

Read on to find out more about the shortlisted albums below and listen to episodes of The Ten. 

Name: Angine de Poitrine
Album: Vol. II
Hometown: Saguenay, Que.
Release date: April 3, 2026
Polaris history: This is the duo’s first appearance on the short list.

About the album: Beginning with the rapid, churning groove on opening track Fabienk, Quebec math and prog rockers Angine de Poitrine have cemented their wonderfully weird ride with their second album, Vol. II. Following the band’s explosive, viral performance on KEXP earlier this year, this album was one of the buzziest of this spring, with music fans and critics alike wondering what the polka-dotted pair would do next under their newfound spotlight.

The result was a winding, wonky and syncopated record, filled with microtonal sounds that demonstrate not only creativity, but technical skill. The project has earned bandmates Klek and Khn praise in outlets from the New York Times (“The band fully understands the power of rhythm, repetition, dissonance, surprise and noise, while it delivers them in a whimsical package”) and Pitchfork (“The pair claim they have been playing together for 20 years, and their telekinetic bond is apparent in these twisted arrangements”).

Vol. II is only six tracks long, however with all but one song clocking in over the six-minute mark, it feels just as robust as other records, purposefully twisting and looping into something that is energetically over the top. “The whole idea of the band was to assume a bit of a satirical approach to rock music in general,” Khn told Cult Mtl. And that sense of fun and play is evident in every track. — Natalie Harmsen

Name: Aquakultre
Album: 1783
Hometown: Halifax
Release date: Feb. 6, 2026
Polaris history: This is Aquakultre’s first Polaris shortlist appearance; both of his previous albums — 2020’s Legacy and 2022’s Don’t Trip — were longlisted.

About the album: “They thought we won’t survive, but our people thrived,” sings Lance Sampson, a.k.a. Aquakultre, on Scotia Born, the very first song we heard off 1783. He called it “an anthem celebrating the families and legacies of Black Nova Scotians, reminding Black Scotians how connected we are” — and it became the thesis statement for his record.

1783 started as a way for Sampson to find out more about his family history, and after years of research — part of which turned into a multi-season TV show called Generations: Black Memories of Nova Scotia — the artist discovered that his family goes back eight generations, reaching all the way back to when more than 3,000 Black Loyalists left New York and landed in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution.

Enlisting the talents of Linda Carvery, Measha Brueggergosman and Gary Beals, among others, Sampson worked with musician and producer (and CBC East Coast Music Hour producer) Erin Costelo to turn all this history into a 17-track concept album that spans genres and generations. Album opener What Are You Sayin’ swings with ease, the horns helping Sampson ask a common question growing up in Overtown (or Uniacke Square), one he wasn’t always sure how to answer. The haunting Gallows is the album’s centrepiece, a song about Sampson’s great-great-great grandfather, Daniel Perry Sampson, who was the last person executed in Halifax in 1935 — for a crime his family says he didn’t commit. 

Aquakultre titled his debut album Legacy, and it was a breath of fresh air from a newly rising artist in mid-2020. But with 1783, Sampson has continued to fulfill that first promise — and shine a light on the legacies of so many Black African Nova Scotian voices in the process. — Holly Gordon

Name: Begonia
Album: Fantasy Life
Hometown: Winnipeg
Release date: Oct. 24, 2025
Polaris history: This is Begonia’s second time on the short list; her album Powder Blue was shortlisted in 2023. Her debut album, Fear, was on the 2020 long list. 

About the album: What kind of existence do we imagine for ourselves? What does success look like and how can it be quantified? Begonia (a.k.a. Alexa Dirks) dives into the existential on her third album, Fantasy Life, while preserving the coy humour and revealing lyricism that has made her one of Canada’s most compelling pop outliers. In March, the album won Dirks her first Juno Award for adult alternative album of the year after two previous nominations in the same category.

Fantasy Life was written over a month in Los Angeles with Dirks’s longtime collaborators, writing duo Deadmen (Matt Peters and Matt Schellenberg), who also helped conceive her two previous albums, Powder Blue and Fear. In the opening line of My Fantasy Life, she sardonically says, “The world’s on fire and I’m going to write a pop song,” before diving into a stirring reflection on her career and finding her truest self onstage. Across the album, she contemplates the insecurity of aging (Out of My Control), the mundanity of love (Life of the Party), the woes of the industry (Conditional Love) and the escapism necessary to avoid a downward spiral (So High). 

For Dirks, life is about the marathon, not the sprint, and as she pieces together the bits of her life as it is now across this record, she’s not ashamed to admit the ways she’s found wanting. What makes Fantasy Life so endearing is that in her relatable vulnerability, she speaks to the self-doubt in all of us. Dirks told CBC Q’s Tom Power in an interview following the album’s release that her music career “isn’t about one singular success; it’s about making art and creating a world other people can step into and hopefully find some relief and authenticity in me saying it’s not always easy.” — Kelsey Adams

Name: Beverly Glenn-Copeland 
Album: Laughter in Summer
Hometown: Hamilton via Philadelphia
Release date: April 3, 2026
Polaris history: His 1986 album, Keyboard Fantasies, won the Polaris Slaight Family Heritage Prize in 2020. The prize celebrates albums released before Polaris’s inception in 2006.

About the album: After revealing a dementia diagnosis in 2024, Beverly Glenn-Copeland decided to trade crossword puzzles on the couch for crowds around the world. He told his wife, and musical partner, Elizabeth, “I have places I want to see and people I want to meet before I die. Since we have to make money, let’s make money doing what we love to do.” Now in his 80s, Glenn-Copeland is taking a triumphant final bow, and Laughter in Summer is the embodiment, with each song allowing him to be joyfully in command of the couple’s story. 

Despite no longer being able to transcribe his music, he can still perform, which is how the album came together. Each song was recorded in a single take, with Glenn-Copeland’s inescapable, soulful and chill-inducing voice driving them all. It’s seamless, with lyrics about love flowing effortlessly.

Glenn-Copeland has always possessed an undeniable ability to make listeners feel, and now he’s turning that dial up to 11 on songs like Harbour, a gentle duet with Elizabeth, and Let Us Dance, a re-imagined, choir-heavy version of a song from his cult-favourite new-age album Keyboard Fantasies. The undercurrent of sadness within many of the melodies across the project is often halted in its tracks by the palpable emotion with which Copeland sings. It makes the re-worked old songs, such as Prince Caspian’s Dream, feel not just refreshed but entirely transformed. And the new ones, including Children’s Anthem, sound almost holy. Overall, it’s an exercise in how the Glenn-Copelands love each other. — NH

Name: Bibi Club
Album: Amaro
Hometown: Montreal
Release date: Feb. 27, 2026
Polaris history: This is Bibi Club’s third Polaris nod: the duo’s debut album, Le soleil et la mer, was longlisted in 2023, and followup album Feu de garde was shortlisted in 2025.

About the album: Bibi Club’s introspective dream pop takes its most inward turn on Amaro, an album that transforms the Montreal duo’s living-room dance floor set for their bibis (a.k.a. loved ones) into a processing of grief after the loss of two people dear to them. The titular Amaro is a legendary character, according to the press release, and it lives between life and death, “a place where we mourn.” The musical and real-life partners Adèle Trottier-Rivard and Nicolas Basque dive deeper and darker on each track, pressing on that grief button until it releases. “La mort et la vie/ et la vie/ le coeur est un lieu qui ne meurt jamais” (Death and life/ and life/ the heart is a place that never dies), Trottier-Rivard sings on the title track, as Basque builds the song into a frenzy from a sinister guitar riff. 

Ultimately, the two stay true to what they’ve always been preaching: life is worth living, and love and community will pull you through. Where we saw Trottier-Rivard and Basque surround themselves with the natural world on 2025’s Feu de garde, partially inspired by Trottier-Rivard’s time as a Girl Guide, we see them tug harder on that throughline with Amaro, even including an ode to George Sand, the 1800s feminist writer and botanist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. “A song full of thirst for life, about the force of nature and the therapeutic benefits it provides,” as the duo explained. “Je veux aimer, je veux vivre,” or, “I want to love, I want to live,” Trottier-Rivard sings on George Sand, atop a furious storm of guitar, percussion and saxophone (played gloriously by Dimitri Milburn). Bibi Club has always been about creating the perfect ecosystem for dancing, but this time they’re dancing to reclaim their lives. — HG

Name: Charlotte Cornfield
Album: Hurts Like Hell
Hometown: Toronto
Release date: March 27, 2026
Polaris history: This is Cornfield’s first shortlist nomination. She was previously longlisted in 2019 for her third album, The Shape of Your Name.

About the album: Being six albums into your career can present a challenge of growth and creativity, but singer-songwriter Charlotte Cornfield has taken perhaps her biggest leap yet on Hurts Like Hell. Her latest outing is her first since the birth of her daughter, a pivotal moment that broadened her perspective both personally and musically. 

Cornfield is an artist who often works on her own, but Hurts Like Hell invites an exciting list of collaborators including producer Philip Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Laura Veirs), a backing band made up of Palehound’s El Kempner, Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney, Adam Brisbin and Sean Mullins, plus guest vocalists Feist, Buck Meek, Christian Lee Hutson and Maia Friedman. 

Cornfield’s lyrical scope, while still keenly observational and rich in details, finds new perspectives in characters outside of her own experience. But a throughline of perseverance and working through difficult emotions and times is rewarded with an album full of warmth and reassurance that on the other side of things is an abundance of love. — ML

Name: Les Louanges
Album: Alouette!
Hometown: Lévis, Que. 
Release date: April 10, 2026
Polaris history: All three of Les Louanges’ albums have received Polaris recognition: his debut, La nuit est une panthère, was on the 2019 short list and his second album, Crash, made the 2022 long list. 

About the album: Les Louanges (a.k.a. Vincent Roberge) pulled the title for his third album from the Quebecois nursery rhyme Alouette, which he transmutes into a symbol of his identity. “L’alouette, quand je m’adresse à elle dans l’album, c’est à mon identité québécoise … dans ce contexte où tout le monde se bat pour donner une définition de ce que c’est, le Québec, de qui en est et qui n’en est pas partie (When I address the lark in my album, I’m addressing my Quebecois identity … in the context of everyone fighting to define what Quebec is, and who is and is not part of it),” he told Le Devoir.

Across the album’s 15 tracks, Les Louanges delivers scathing indictments of anti-immigrant sentiments, highlights the impending climate catastrophe, considers his relationship to masculinity and comes face-to-face with mourning — all topics at the forefront of the minds of many of his fellow zillenials. 

Roberge wrote the album on the cusp of turning 30, and co-produced it with his longtime collaborator Félix Petit. On Alouette! Roberge merges the political and the personal, most notably on the album opener Je confirme ma présence: “Le monde est à ta porte/ des munitions tirées sur des Gazaouis/ sont faites au Québec, mon pote (The world is at your doorstep/ the ammunition being shot at Gazans/ Is made in Quebec, my friend).” Always one to experiment with sound, Alouette! is more rock-leaning than Roberge’s previous outputs, which suits the immediacy of his messages. Roberge doesn’t suppose to have any definitive answers about the way forward, but Alouette! manages to be inspiring nonetheless through its reminder that to be fully human, one must wear their heart on their sleeve. — KA

Name: Peaches
Album: No Lube So Rude
Hometown: Toronto
Release date: Feb. 20, 2026
Polaris history: This is Peaches’ first shortlist appearance. In 2016, her album Rub was longlisted for the prize, and in 2015 her seminal electroclash album The Teaches of Peaches won the Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize.

About the album: In the world of Peaches, time — and especially the concept of aging — is truly a construct. It may have been 11 years since the electroclash pioneer last released an album, but she doesn’t miss a beat on No Lube So Rude. It’s filled with razor-sharp wordplay, unabashed sexuality and her signature brash punk attitude, as Peaches raises a megaphone at the intersection of the personal and the political. “Older than you/ looking so c–t,” she immediately exclaims on the opening track, Hanging Titties. Her wisdom wields an instant command that she holds throughout the album’s 11 tracks.

Sexual freedom and bodily autonomy have always been core tenets of Peaches’ philosophy, and they’re just as important, if not more urgent, today than they were 20 years ago. As 2SLGBTQIA+ rights continue to be threatened, and many of those voices are pushed into silence, Peaches uses industrial-sized beats to loudly advocate for equality and rights. “We will stop you f–king up our lives,” she asserts on Not In Your Mouth, None of Your Business. On F–k How You Wanna F–k, she’s even more direct, aiming her ire at the U.S. Supreme Court: “F–k Kavanaugh, I’m a cougar/ caught in my claw, there is no law.” Activist Maggie Kuhn once said, “Old age is an excellent time for outrage.” Now, more than two decades into her career, Peaches is more fired up than ever, fuelling anthems of pleasure and protest in equal measure. — ML

Name: Rochelle Jordan
Album: Through the Wall
Hometown: Wheatley, Ont., by way of London, England
Release date: Sept. 26, 2025
Polaris history: Jordan’s second album, Play With the Changes, was longlisted in 2021.

About the album: On Rochelle Jordan’s third album, the house and R&B star breaks through the walls of her mind for a record that flirts, twirls and sashays across the dance floor. “My soul and my body, it feels it every time,” she sings on the bouncing song The Boy, produced by Polaris winner Kaytranada, about yearning for a love interest who makes her heart race. Traversing different flavours of dance, Words 2 Say pairs a skittering U.K. garage and jungle beat with airy vocals, and the titular TTW is a bumping, four-on-the-floor look into Jordan ’s psyche: “Let them say what they want to, still here,” she sings, hitting the gas.

Although she’s been making music for more than 15 years, Through the Wall feels akin to a renaissance — everything she’s done has been building to this moment, from battling sickle cell anemia to depression to going independent. The album is self-assured, slick and critics took notice, with Jordan receiving her flowers in Pitchfork, the Fader, CBC Music and beyond. But what truly comes across is her own confidence, evident in the strength of the writing (Jordan co-wrote every song) and her silky delivery. Even when singing lightly, she evokes a mix of Sade, Donna Summer and other icons who have each honed a distinct sound, and Jordan’s is that of a diva, gyrating to the beat of her choosing. “When [Through The Wall] came out and I saw the reaction, that was confirmation that I’m exactly where I need to be,” she told Range Magazine, and in NME she shared: “It’s time to let the dolls know that I know who I am — and I’m a muse.” — NH

Name: Tanya Tagaq
Album: Saputjiji
Hometown: Iqaluktuuttiaq, Nunavut
Release date: March 6, 2026
Polaris history: Tanya Tagaq won the Polaris Prize in 2014 for her album Animism, was shortlisted again in 2017 for Retribution, and longlisted in 2022 for Tongues. 

About the album: In the face of the military-industrial complex and the rise of capitalist tech oligarchies, Saputjiji stands as a “harbinger of change” and a “designated protector” of the flora and fauna, the people and the future. Tanya Tagaq’s fifth album finds her stirred up into righteous anger over the remnants of colonisation, forced assimilation and genocide. Taqag has  never cowered in the face of adversity; instead she uses fury as a galvanizing force through these 11 songs co-produced by Sumach and Jean Martin. Blending hardcore, IDM and ambient tones, Taqaq expresses her grief and anger through throat singing, groans, wails and barks. 

The opening track, F–k War, is as declarative a statement as ever, with Tagaq’s guttural refrain playing out over spiky synths and bleating electric guitar. On Foxtrot, featuring F–ked Up’s Damian Abraham, she flips military verbiage on its head to create a protest rallying cry. Comparatively, Exit Wound is expansive and pulsing, her voice high and bright as she contemplates the aftermath of colonization: “You left, but we live with your exit wound.”

In an interview with CBC Arts, Tagaq spoke about her stage production Split Tooth: Saputjiji, which includes music from the album, hoping people would glean new ways of moving forward after experiencing it: “The world’s in a difficult place right now, and what I would hope is that people would walk away with the understanding that there is hope, and that there is a way to be an antidote to what the world is wreaking upon us right now.” — KA