Also Cool's Festival BleuBleu 2025 Top Picks

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Also Cool is headed to the East Coast! Returning for its 7th edition to Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, Festival BleuBleu is an annual weekend music festival and summer staple in Gaspésie, Quebec and the greater Maritime region. Held from June 20th-23rd, the festival acts as a hub and meeting place for music lovers, whether local or festival-goers, aiming to "introduce or rediscover the town's cultural and historical sites [and] foster exchanges" by programming music from the region and beyond in less conventional venues.  

This year’s lineup features a multitude of enticing genres and styles, with artists from across the province of Quebec (and elsewhere!) performing everything from Acadien country-pop to digital dance music.

Closing the Saturday night is Also Cool's beachside program, with performances by Ouri (DJ set), Honeydrip and Isla Den.

Explore Festival BleuBleu’s programming through Also Cool’s must-see acts from this year’s roster and listen to our accompanying festival playlist below!

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Gus Englehorn by Kealan Shilling

Alaska-raised, Hawaii-bound Gus Englehorn welcomed 2025 with the release of The Hornbook, a fantastical outsider-rock opus co-produced by Mark Lawson of The Unicorns, and mixed by Butthole Surfers founder Paul Leary. Much like his career trajectory (having spent most of his life training to be a professional snowboarder), Englehorn’s sound is endearingly strange. At times fuzzy and brooding, and others veering into freak-folk territory, Englehorn’s musical dexterity is delightfully unpredictable and entertaining. His uncompromised stage presence is always a hit, and we’re looking forward to hearing his latest setlist in the flesh! 

Gus Englehorn plays Sunday, June 22nd, 2025 at Horizon Park Beach.

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Honeydrip by Felix Bonnevie

Not only is Montreal’s Honeydrip an incredible dub-focused DJ and producer – she is also an innovator in the world of sound design; building her own systems over the past couple of years. Her most recent album Psychotropical, featuring collaborations with Ouri, Shanique Marie and King Shadrock, expands on her hypnotic sound that has captured dancefloors worldwide.

Read our interview with Honeydrip on her debut EP Anti-Ego here.

Honeydrip plays Saturday, June 21st, 2025 at Horizons Park Beach.

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Isla Den by Taylor Tomlin

Kindred spirits in the realm of rave-tinged hyperpop and exploratory multimedia, friends Ellie Manning and Mira Reale are Montreal electronic duo Isla Den. As classmates turned collaborators, Isla Den have constructed a musical illusion whereby “Manning's lyrics explore themes of infinity, distance, and dreams, veiled by auto-tune and carried by lyrical flights over sensual futuristic structures, fusing underground electronica, trance, and technicolor dream pop.” Having performed across North America and Europe, we’re eager to have our first run-in with the pair at BleuBleu.

Isla Den plays Saturday, June 21st, 2025 at Horizons Park Beach.

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Magi Merlin by Vladim Vilain

An Also Cool forever-favourite, Montreal alt-R&B darling Magi Merlin has exploded onto the international scene. A multi-faceted artist, Merlin recently made her acting debut in the movie Mile End Kicks from writer-director Chandler Levack (I Like Movies), alongside lead actress Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria). On top of that, she recently shared her long-awaited debut LP, A Weird Little Dog, which slows her sound down and bares her soul. 

Read our first-ever interview with Magi, that came out five years ago (!!!), here.

Magi Merlin plays Sunday, June 22nd, 2025 at the Beautiful Shipwreck Beach Manor Scene.

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Ouri by Feng

A longtime staple in Montreal’s music scene, Ouri exudes ethereal mastery as a multi-instrumentalist and DJ. Her ability to weave orchestral sound with electronic music is unparalleled, in both her last album Frame of a Fauna, and with her collaborative project with Helena Deland, Hildegard. No matter the sonic medium, Ouri delivers a gorgeous and captivating performance. 

Dive deeper into Ouri’s world by reading our interview with the artist about Frame of a Fauna here, and with Hildegard about their debut album here.

Ouri plays Saturday, June 21st, 2025 at Horizons Park Beach.

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P’tit Belliveau by Sacha Cohen

East Coast treasure P’tit Belliveau is sure to deliver a rowdy performance. Known for his earworms “Income Tax” and “J'aimerais d’avoir un John Deere”, Belliveau reps his Baie-Saint-Marie, Nova Scotia, roots for sold-out audiences. Hot on the heels of releasing his third self-titled album, we’re excited to embrace his evolving sound — fusing nu-metal and pop-punk with his signature Acadien country-pop sensibility. Let’s go (en français)!  

P’tit Belliveau plays Friday, June 20th, 2025 at the SiriusXM Stage.

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Secondsight by Vladim Vilain

Montreal’s Secondsight will lead an outdoor yoga session combining mindful movements, breathing and meditation set to their music. Titled Mirrors in the Sky: Opening to Infinity, the 60-minute class seeks to explore “the profound connection between our inner selves and the cosmos around us.” Secondsight is the solo musical and spiritual pilgrimage project of multi-disciplinary artist, astrologist and meditation teacher Haji Maa. We’re looking forward to coming up for air by the Atlantic ocean amid the festival hustle and bustle!  

Secondsight’s workshop is Monday morning on June 23rd, 2025 at the Tracadigash Point Lighthouse.

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Xela Edna by Cherry Blue

Montreal avant-pop vocalist Xela Edna sparks curiosity with her bold, uninhibited approach to dance music. Scheduled to release her debut full-length album this year, Edna’s songwriting combines tenets of electro, techno and experimental French pop. Alongside her creative partner and longtime friend Eicus Echo, Edna’s music explores “emancipatory themes related to being a young woman in the 21st century.” 

Xela Edna plays Friday, June 20th, 2025 at the Beautiful Shipwreck Beach Manor Scene.

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Festival BleuBleu

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Convulse, Groove and Exercise Your Demons with Gus Englehorn’s "Dungeon Master" (Secret City Records)

Gus Englehorn. Photo courtesy of Ariane Moisan

What’s the secret to fashioning tunes that veer from traditional genres? Watch cult classics with your guitar in hand. Having reified reveries from the eclectic fusion of Britpop and film, Gus Englehorn’s Dungeon Master gives organized existence to Dadaism’s deliberate irrationality.  

The album is the second to come from post-art rocker Englehorn and Estée Preda—the project’s drummer and Englehorn’s life partner. Its first single, "The Gate", was released late last year, within which a first-person narration of Hitchcock’s Rebecca is brought to life. The tune’s mélange of gasps inaugurates an eye into the surrealist content that exists throughout the remainder of the album. 

Disguised in what could be a nursery rhyme, the duo’s latest single “Run Rabbit Run” brims with playful alliterations and arcane matters. After a cacophonous fury of first-person narratives, the track slows down, allowing Englehorn’s vibrato to take center stage. The track’s accompanying video parades an endearing compilation of the twosome’s home videos—have a watch and take a ride with them down to Texas!

Expect bright strumming patterns resemblant of Blur’s Britpop years, vocal theatricality, and manic, oblique lyrics in the album’s surplus of nine tracks. Disguised in the most avant-garde of metaphors, a constellation of themes are canvassed in Dungeon Master: the lunacy of songwriting, a fictitious night spent on the Sunset Strip, and parasitism. 

For fans of Oasis, Daniel Johnston, Beck, David Lynch, and a counter to traditional artistic values, Englehorn’s sophomore Dungeon Master is for your ears. Gyrate, shuffle your feet and get lost in an idiosyncratic farrago of eccentricities as freakish as a demon themself.

CJ Sommerfeld for Also Cool Mag: First off, thanks for your time today with Also Cool and congrats on the new album! I'm interested in this transition from a professional snowboarding career to that of music – had you been making music or songwriting during your snowboarding years? What forces were responsible for this change in careers?

Gus Englehorn: Thanks for having me! I had been writing songs for years and years, pretty much the whole time I was snowboarding. I really thought it out when I was very young. I imagined a day when I would be too old to snowboard professionally, and I thought to myself that that would be a very sad day. But I also thought that if I could learn how to write songs, I could do that thereafter until the day I died. So I took songwriting very seriously the whole time I was snowboarding, and I spent all my free time trying to master the craft.

Also Cool: A few of the tracks on Dungeon Master, notably “The Gate” and “Exercise your Demons”, were inspired by different cult classics. Is film the main space where you draw songwriting inspiration from?

Gus Englehorn: Film certainly is a huge inspiration to me. I often sit with a guitar and watch movies; I’ll pause to play some guitar, and watch a little more, and then pause, and then play a little more. I guess it’s the storytelling that intrigues me,  and the way that great movies can suck you into their universe and give you a new perspective to write from. 

AC: The strumming patterns, instrumental motifs and simple vocals heard throughout Dungeon Master reminisce those revered in the alt-rock subgenre, Britpop. Which artists and albums did you draw artistic merit from when putting together Dungeon Master? 

GE: I love Britpop, and people don’t usually see that influence in the songs. But I love Blur AND Oasis! Especially Oasis. Some other big influences for the album were Roy Orbison, The Germs, The Pixies, Daniel Johnston, Beck, The Meat Puppets, Nirvana, Ennio Morricone, The Butthole Surfers and the song structures on Sgt Pepper’s.

AC: “Ups and Downs” puts forth a narration of the human condition. Can you tell us more about how this one came about, specifically what ‘evidence’ signifies in the verse: “Evidence is on the ground / evidence is all around / evidence is on the dot / evidence--it’s all we got”?

GE: I wanted the music to recreate the experience of writing songs: the burnouts along with the productive periods of mania right before you burn out, and the intoxicating triumphs and soul-crushing defeats. You’ll think a song is done and then the next day you will throw it away and start all over again. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least. The evidence is just all the little objects that go along with songwriting that are usually strewn about the place when I find myself writing – picks, empty tea cups, crumpled-up T-shirts, journals, books, cables.  These exist as the evidence that you’ve been working, but if you aren't getting anything done, then that's all there is…jJust the evidence. That’s one thing that is the hardest about writing songs, is that you aren’t guaranteed to get anywhere even if you work everyday for a year straight. But when something comes together, there’s nothing quite like it! 

AC: I would love to hear more about “Sunset Strip”. Is this tune a portrayal of a tripping and falling event you experienced, or is this West Hollywood mention a metaphor?

GE: To be perfectly honest, most of the songs are just plucked out of my imagination and don’t have a whole lot to do with myself – or anything else from reality, for that matter. This is one of those songs that I just dreamed up out of nowhere, seemingly. It tells the story of somebody's terrible night spent on the Sunset Strip: being kicked out of parties, bloody noses, falling downstairs, social anxiety, and almost being hit by a bus. I had never even been to the Sunset Strip when I wrote it.

AC: A reverbed and roomy guitar breaks into heavy percussions in the track that wraps up Dungeon Master –  “The Flea”. The tune’s dramatic qualities provide a fitting outro to the album. I can’t help but interpret this one as a quarantine track, which makes me wonder if it is directed towards society; most notably in the line “I’ve been your flea for years”. Who is the ‘you’ in this tune’s direct address?

GE: While it was written during quarantine like the rest of the album, “The Flea” tells the tale of a parasitic romantic relationship. I wrote it about all the years Estée (my wife who plays drums in the band) supported me while I was transitioning from snowboarding into learning how to write songs, so I’m the flea. Stylistically, we were inspired by Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” and “In Heaven” from Eraserhead by Peter Ivers and David Lynch. There is something that keeps me mashing up early rock and roll riffs with subversive little stories time and time again! Lots of fun to be had doing that, for some reason. 

AC: Thanks for your words and time, Gus! Aside from your upcoming album drop, do you have any other creative endeavours coming our way?

GE: I remain entirely obsessed with songwriting for the moment, and I’m hoping I can finish a third album before too long.

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Dungeon Master

Releases April 29th, 2022 via Secret City Records

1. The Gate

2. Ups and Downs

3. Exercise Your Demons

4. Sunset Strip

5. Oh Well Unwell

6. Tarantula

7. Lips

8. Run Rabbit Run

9. Terrible Horse

10. The Flea

Produced by Gus Englehorn and Estée Preda

All songs written and composed by Gus Englehorn

Recorded and mixed by Alex Ouzilleau

Mastering by Marc Thériault at Le Lab Mastering

All tracks recorded at Le Magnétophone in Québec City, QC in 2020

Published by Secret City Publishing

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Gus Englehorn

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CJ Sommerfeld (she/her) is a Vancouver-based freelance writer with a particular interest in the convergence of language, art and society. When she is not writing, you can find her experimenting with harmonic minor progressions on her keyboard.

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