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Noeline Hofmann
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Amazon Music Canada Reveals Artists To Watch 2025: Noeline Hofmann, Tia Wood and More
The streaming service has announced the seven artists in this year's program, which also includes Sadboi, Dylan Sinclair, elijah woods, Chani Nattan & Inderpal Moga and Claudia Bouvette. In this story, Hofmann talks about her hopes for the year.
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Amazon Music Canada is revealing its Artists To Watch for 2025.
The artists are chosen by the team at the streaming platform and given support and promotion throughout the year as well as inclusion in the company's initiatives, like last year's original Tragically Hip cover from country singer Owen Riegling and Quebec artist Fredz' appearance at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
This year's list includes seven artists across genres, from country to R&B, with artists representing Quebec pop, Indigenous music and the Punjabi Wave.
Here are this year's Artists to Watch in Canada followed by a Canada Now playlist with songs from each of them:
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- SadBoi
- Noeline Hofmann
- Dylan Sinclair
- elijah woods
- Tia Wood
- Claudia Bouvette
- Chani Nattan & Inderpal Moga
Many of these artists started their breakthroughs in 2024 but could be poised to make an even bigger splash this year.
Plains Cree and Salish singer Tia Wood earned a dedicated following on social media before releasing her debut Sony Music EP last year, and impressed with an aura-filled set of performances with a rising artist platform at Billboard Canada's Women in Music celebration. Elijah Woods, who first caught attention on CBC TV show The Launch alongside Jamie Fine, has made an impression with his solo pop music recently and also walked the red carpet the Billboard Canada Women in Music event.
Chani Nattan signed last year to 91 North Records, one of the country's biggest platforms for Punjabi music, and "8 Asle" was one of YouTube Canada's most popular music videos. Claudia Bouvette was featured at M for Montreal, earning comparisons to Sabrina Carpenter for her playful and relatable pop. Sadboi's "Fashion Week" was one of our staff's favourite songs of last year, and her adventurous genre-spanning sound has turned a lot of heads. Dylan Sinclair, too, has been bubbling for a few years and is poised to go big this year.
Of all seven artists, the one who may have made the biggest surprise international splash in the last year was Noeline Hofmann. The 20-year-old Alberta cowgirl brought tears to the eyes of alternative country star Zach Bryan, duetting with him on her song "Purple Gas" after performing a version of the song on his Belting Bronco YouTube series. The collab version was included on both her Purple Gas EP and his The Great American Bar Scene album, and led to her debut on the Billboard Hot 100.
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Though she's still young and the breakthrough moment happened seemingly out of nowhere, Hofmann tells Billboard Canada that she's no rookie.
"I've been almost waiting for the last year to happen all my life," she says from her parents' house in Bow Island, Alberta. "It's what I've always been working towards and it kind of materialized tight under my fingers, which was just really unbelievable."
Hofmann has been writing songs since she was a teenager, but her small town surroundings didn't give much chance to play live. When she graduated high school, pandemic lockdowns were still happening, so there were no stages for her play on. She instead took a ranch job, before eventually moving back home and deciding to go all in on singing and songwriting.
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Hofmann infuses her rural upbringing and perspective into all her songs, which make them feel very specific but also universal in a classic country way. That made it feel all the more surreal when people from all over the world were hearing her songs, like "Purple Gas," which gets its title from the tax-subsidized gas used exclusively by ranchers, and "Rodeo Junkies," a song informed by her friend taking a rodeo cowboy down a notch.
"The more that I travel to big cities and meet folks in all sorts of places, the more that I realize just how specific and foreign that most of the experiences I had growing up in in the middle of nowhere are," she says. "I'm so proud of where I'm from and proud to tell those stories, and I feel a responsibility to tell them as well. I want kids in rural communities to know that if they have dreams outside what they might have seen growing up, or the number of careers you can count on one hand, they can make their own luck and make what they want happen no matter where they come from."
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The Artists to Watch support comes at a time when her reach has expanded in a major way, and she's excited to use the platform to do some big things in the new year, including appearances at some of the biggest country festivals on the North American circuit.
"Just based on this year, it's hard to imagine what this time next year might look like," she says. "But I'm hoping to sink my teeth into a new project and elevate the band, elevate my songs, elevate everything."
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