Vancouver based vintage soul, blues and roots quartet Honeybear will release its new album, ‘The Cure,’ on September 4, marking the follow up to a debut that turned four longtime friends into one of Canada’s fastest rising roots acts. The band celebrates with two album release shows, first at Upstairs in Victoria on September 9 alongside Emmett Jerome, then home in Vancouver on September 10 at the Hollywood Theatre.
https://www.youtube.com/@honeybear_the_band
Honeybear formed in 2023, though the members had already spent decades crossing paths on tours across Canada and down the West Coast. The band’s origin traces back to the pandemic, when the group found itself jamming outdoors in parks, running amps and PA systems off jerry rigged motorcycle batteries just to keep playing live music together. That same instinct, chasing the sound over everything else, still defines the band, described by music blog B-Side Guys as sounding “like The Teskey Brothers collaborated with the ghost of Muddy Waters.”
Listen to Spotify here:
‘The Cure’ expands that sound well beyond the original quartet. Across 11 tracks, Beaty and Brumelle’s songwriting is joined by rotating keys from Mike Kenney and Cindy Fairbank, drums from Geoff Hicks and Tim Watson, pedal steel from Scott Smith, horns from Jerry Cook, Jocelyn Waugh, Adam Kyle and Gregory Dent, and background vocals from Dawn Pemberton and Colleen Rennison. The album was recorded across two studios, with Jeff Zipp behind the board at Light Machine and John Raham recording at Afterlife Studios, before Zipp mixed the record and Doug Krebs handled mastering, the same team responsible for the warm, horn laced sound the band has built its reputation on.
The album’s early single, “Just Your Fool,” offers a preview of what’s ahead, a classic blues ballad built around devotion that may not be entirely returned. Written by Beaty and Brumelle and produced by Zipp, the song is a riff on the Slim Harpo classic “Raining in My Heart” and has already passed 100,000 streams, proof that there is still a real appetite for horn driven, human sounding music made the old way.
That appetite has followed the band since its 2025 debut, ‘I Was Wrong,’ which has surpassed nine million streams on Spotify with 200,000 monthly listeners, landing placement on official Spotify Editorial playlists including Retro Soul, The New Retro and Best Blues of 2025, along with airplay from CBC, NPR, CKUA and indie and co-op stations around the world. The band has become a festival favourite at Rifflandia, Barnside Harvest Fest, Vancouver Jazz Festival, Calgary Blues Fest, Kitchener Blues Fest, Wapiti and Starbelly, and has sold out club dates across Canada from The Horseshoe in Toronto, Upstairs in Victoria, Rainbow in Ottawa to the Ironwood in Calgary.
The industry has taken notice as well, with Honeybear recently nominated for a Blues Music Award from the Memphis based Blues Foundation, a Blues Artist of the Year nomination from the WCMA, a spot on the Vancouver Sun’s “10 Artists to Watch in 2026,” and Roots Music Canada’s New Discovery of the Year.
Listen https://honeybear-the-band.bandcamp.com/
With ‘The Cure’ arriving September 4, Honeybear, the Band brings its road-tested chemistry and growing cast of collaborators into its most fully realized record yet and invites fans out to hear it live at both release shows.
Album Release Shows:
September 9, 2026, Upstairs, Victoria, BC, with Emmett Jerome
September 10, 2026, Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver, BC, album release party