The Beaches Are Billboard Canada’s Women of the Year 2025

The Beaches’ viral rise in 2023 was only the beginning. This year is proving to be their biggest year yet — and they’re ready for it.

After spending the summer having their songs screamed back at them by tens of thousands of fans at Coachella, Osheaga and Pukkelpop in Belgium, the Toronto band have just released their already critically acclaimed new album No Hard Feelings.

The tour will bring them to the most monumental concert of their journey so far: their largest ever headlining show at their hometown Scotiabank Arena on November 6.

Amidst that whirlwind, they’ll mark yet another career milestone. The Beaches will be named Women of the Year at Billboard Canada Women in Music 2025 — the first time Billboard’s prestigious flagship award will go to a whole group rather than a single artist.

The whole band — Jordan Miller (lead vocals, bass), Kylie Miller (guitar), Leandra Earl (guitar, keys) and Eliza Enman-McDaniel (drums) — will accept the honour at Billboard Canada Women in Music in Toronto on October 1.

“We’re so honoured to be celebrated alongside so many incredible women who have done so much for the music industry,” says Kylie Miller, sitting with her bandmates at Toronto’s Pearson Airport on their way to a show in St. John’s, Newfoundland. (Because two members share a last name, we’ll refer to them by first name in this story).

“Our team is built around women working together, so anytime we get to celebrate communities of women uplifting one another, it feels amazing,” adds her sister Jordan.

The Beaches have a predominantly female management team led by Billboard Canada Manager of the Year Laurie Lee Boutet, a content team led by Meg Moon and a team of co-writers who finally, truly get them.

They’ve cultivated the diverse fanbase they’ve always been looking to reach, one that reflects the members of the band — mostly young and female, increasingly queer, but also anyone who can relate to the often universally relatable heartbreak experiences they sing about.

“We’ve garnered a new fan base that represents who we are,” says Leandra. “We’re now seeing ourselves in the audience and they’re seeing themselves on stage.”

The Beaches photographed by Lane Dorsey in Toronto in 2025.The Beaches photographed by Lane Dorsey in Toronto in 2025.

For many of their new fans, “Blame Brett” was the beginning. That 2023 song was a major breakthrough, garnering millions of streams on Spotify and TikTok, giving them their first U.S. Billboard chart placement. It brought them into bigger and bigger venues and higher spots on festival lineups.

For The Beaches, though, their journey started much earlier.

“More than 15 years, is that right?” asks Jordan.

“No. You guys started when you were 10, right?” answers Leandra. “So it’s been almost 20 years.”

Jordan pauses for a second to do the math and realizes she’s right.

“Oh my God, don’t say that again!”

Now in their late 20s, Jordan and Kylie Miller started playing music together as children. They soon joined up with Eliza Enman-McDaniel — who lived nearby in The Beaches, the Toronto neighbourhood that now gives them their name — to form a band. In the late 2000s, they weren't The Beaches yet, but a group called Done With Dolls.

Leandra Earl wouldn’t join until years later, but she was an early fan. Onstage for an intimate show with The Beaches at the Mod Club as part of Billboard Canada’s THE STAGE at NXNE in Toronto this past June, she recalled seeing them at the same venue more than a decade earlier.

“I went with my sister to see this Disney boy band All-Star Weekend, and Done With Dolls were opening,” Leandra elaborates now. “I had seen their music videos on the Family Channel, and seeing them onstage really inspired me. They were just these young girls but seemed so powerful up there. I had grown up playing music by myself, and I really wanted to play music with friends — especially girls. And eventually, I became friends with them and weaseled my way into the band.”

Done With Dolls had some success on the Disney and Family Channel circuit, touring with late-2000s/early 2010s bands like Faber Drive, Burnham and Action Item. They recently had a mini-throwback to that time, covering Lindsay Lohan’s “Ultimate” for the Freaky Friday sequel Freakier Friday, which sent them back into their memories. As they’ve posted throwback clips on TikTok, some of The Beaches’ fans have put two and two together that they were the same girls.

“I’ve seen those TikToks on my for you page, people connecting the dots. ‘I had no idea they were the same people! I used to listen to them on Family Channel all the time!’” laughs Kylie.

Looking back, they feel like they were treated as a novelty — put in a box as a teen girl rock band. But the many, many hours spent crammed into a rehearsal studio helped prepare them for the long road ahead as The Beaches — already a decade by the time they released their breakthrough, Blame My Ex, in 2023.

First, there was their debut studio album, Late Show, released on the major label Universal Music Canada in 2017. That album, produced by Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw of long-running Canadian band Metric, had some real momentum behind it, especially on Canadian active rock radio. The track “T-Shirt” spent nine weeks on the Billboard Canada Modern Rock Airplay chart and was eventually certified Gold. They played some big sold-out shows in their hometown, including at the 1,500-capacity Danforth Music Hall and 2,500-capacity History.

Looking back now, though, it almost feels like a different band. You could hear what makes them special now, but between the crunchy throwback riffs and ‘70s rock aesthetic, it sometimes felt like a costume they were putting on of what an “all-girl band” was supposed to look and sound like.

“It felt tough for us to always be fit into a certain box,” reflects Eliza. “It had to be this very ‘rock’ almost Runaways type of thing, and that just didn’t feel genuine to who we were.”

In 2022, The Beaches parted ways with Universal. The pandemic had slowed their live momentum, and the EPs they released didn’t seem to be hitting in the same way.

Around that same time, they had a fateful meeting with the woman who would become their manager, Laurie Lee Boutet.

“They were in the process of getting dropped when I met them for the first time,” she told Billboard Canada when she was named Manager of the Year at NXNE this past June. “It was right at the beginning, and they were devastated. They loved Universal. I genuinely believe Universal loved The Beaches as well, but at the time, they’d spent a ton of money, and the records just weren’t connecting the way they wanted them to.”

Boutet could see right away what wasn’t working.

“Your music is just too rock, and rock music doesn’t stream,” she told them. “It doesn’t make sense because you’re made for a streaming service. You’re cool, young girls, funny as hell. If you made the records 20% more pop, I think people would open their arms to you.”

The band decided to try a new image: themselves. They started dressing more in their personal style and writing more about their personal experiences. They hired a creative director, Laura Serra of Les Squeak, a photographer and social media manager Meg Moon and a hair and makeup person, Liv Tsai. They stayed independent, releasing albums on AWAL, a non-traditional, artist-first “recording company” that stands for Artists Without A Label.

Jordan says that keeping a team of women around them at all times has led to their success, not inherently because they’re women, but because their experiences allow them to see something that many others in the industry don’t.

“A lot of people think there is a paint-by-numbers way of becoming successful,” she explains. “It’s not just a male issue, but an issue within the music industry. By devaluing what makes you individual and what makes you unique and trying to do what everybody else does, you put yourself at a real disadvantage. But I think because women are often outliers in every industry that they work in, we often have to think, well, how would I approach this differently?”

With the new team and new vision in place, they got to work on writing their next music. With songwriter Lowell (the winner of the Billboard Canada Non-Performing Songwriter of the Year award in 2024 and the co-writer of Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em”), they sketched out what turned out to be the breakthrough moment of their career: “Blame Brett.” The kiss-off anthem went viral on TikTok and began a new path for the band that took off once they changed who was in the room.

“We finally understood exactly who we were,” says Eliza. “No one was trying to change anything about us. Instead it was like, ‘let’s take this element of who you guys are and amplify it. Let’s not change you, but make you more accessible to other girls and young queer people who can maybe relate to you a little bit more.’ It changed our entire trajectory.”

The Beaches photographed by Lane Dorsey in Toronto in 2025.The Beaches photographed by Lane Dorsey in Toronto in 2025.

It’s clear The Beaches have found their people.

Throughout the summer, The Beaches have played a series of Last Girls At The Parties DJ shows. The events have given the band a chance to get up close and personal with their fans at intimate venues around their festival dates. They did one at Coachella, at Osheaga, and, days before their show at the Mod Club, at NXNE in Toronto.

Ecstatic listeners showed up in droves and lined up down Queen West to get into the famous rock bar Bovine Sex Club, a place that holds a lot of memories for the girls — seeing bands like Fat White Family and partying amongst rock stars like Sean Lennon. They namecheck the bar in their 2021 song “Let’s Go,” a totem against guys who give them unsolicited advice to “quit writing about all the girl stuff.”

Now, they were the hosts — and fans were thrilled to sing and dance among them.

“It’s so much fun to be able to hang out with our fans and break that fourth wall with them,” says Kylie. “It’s a very personal experience for us and for them.”

At NXNE, they showed off their individual tastes, igniting the room with current favourites including Charli xcx’s “Party 4 U” and Role Model’s “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out.” They got nostalgic too, with Leandra playing the 2000s-2010s hits of her youth, from Black Eyed Peas to Pitbull.

“I do a really good transition from Usher’s ‘Yeah!’ to Evanescence’s ‘Bring Me To Life.’” she brags. “It’s pretty iconic. People have asked me to send them a recording of that, and I… will not. It’s too insane. Evanescence would probably send me a cease and desist.”

As Leandra has opened up about her awakening lesbian identity and her later-in-life coming out story, she’s become a favourite of the band’s increasingly queer fanbase.

At a recent show, she took a photo with a fan who got two tattoos of her drawings. At another DJ party, someone gifted her a custom “Lesbian of the Year” dress shirt.

“Lesbian of the Year” is a song from their new album No Hard Feelings, a personal ballad taken from Leandra’s perspective of coming out later in life, including a shoutout to advice she received from Tegan Quin of Tegan & Sara: “better late than never, Tegan told me not to worry.” Now, she’s happy to be that figure for their own fans.

For lead singer and songwriter Jordan Miller, she’s happy to share the perspective this time around. She used the real name of her Canadian rock singer ex-boyfriend in “Blame Brett” which gave the song a personal edge — but it’s a decision that she’s had to live with ever since.

“It was difficult for me to approach writing this record after the success of ‘Blame Brett,’ because I wrote that from a very wounded place,” she shares. “It was a therapy session for me to dive into how I was feeling. But in being so vocal and open about my relationship, I opened myself up to a lot of weird feelings when people who I’ve never met before would ask me out of context about Brett or ask me about my relationship. When you open up your personal life like that, you can put yourself in a really vulnerable place.”

Now that she’s in a happy and committed relationship and her bandmates Leandra and her sister Kylie have gone through their own heartbreak, she has new viewpoints to sing from.

“I was really grateful to use the experiences of other band members and not just expose all my own sh-t again,” she laughs.

Jordan is the main lyric writer of the band, but the process is very collaborative. She compares it to the brunch scenes on Sex and the City, where the four main characters would open up about what’s happening in their personal lives over drinks with their best friends. (For the Sex and the City watchers who are wondering, Jordan used to be Carrie, but now she’s Samantha. Kylie is Charlotte and Eliza is Miranda. Leandra is Steve.)

They’ll start every writing session just talking, debriefing about what’s happening in their dating lives. If someone is feeling heartbroken, or has a funny story, she’ll jot it down. Working with co-writers, one of the main goals is to clarify and articulate the emotions they’re already feeling.

A recently posted TikTok shows the process in action. The Beaches are writing the new song “Did I Say Too Much,” a song about the complications of dating a female partner who also has a boyfriend, when Jordan repeats back the pivotal lyric: “was our whole relationship just your boyfriend’s kink?” Hearing it back, Kylie and Leandra have a visceral reaction, arguing whether it’s a bit too honest. But they can’t help it, they have to be authentic.

“She really used our experience to fire up this album,” says Leandra. “It’s a more queer lens, because I am very queer — [especially] my experience coming out later in life and going through some pretty toxic relationships, because I have just kind of found myself in my sexuality. There’s a lot that our fans will be able to relate to.”

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With all their recent high-profile shows, there’s one that stands out for The Beaches: Osheaga festival in Montreal on August 3.

The band had played the festival, one of the biggest in Canada, twice before, in 2014 and 2018 — but both times on a much smaller side-stage.

“We were so young the first time we played here,” says Eliza, shortly before taking the stage. “This is a full circle moment for us.”

This time around, they were given a prime slot on the main stage shortly before Olivia Rodrigo closed out the festival. The young audience treated them like headliners in their own right, with 30,000 people singing along to every lyric. When they invited the audience to “blame their exes” for the “Blame Brett” climax, it was easy to see how strongly their music has struck a chord.

“It's a Canadian success story,” says Osheaga founder and lead booker Nick Farkas of Quebec promotion company Evenko. “You could sense there was something special with that band from the beginning. They just needed to put in the 10,000 hours of slogging away at it to get to where they're at. They never gave up. They kept plugging away, playing shows, giving it their all, getting better and better – and now they’re here. That’s how rock and roll is supposed to be.”

There are countless stories of musicians whose song blows up on TikTok, they have their 15 minutes of fame, and you never hear about them again. That’s not The Beaches.

The first single from No Hard Feelings, “Last Girls at the Party,” recently spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Canada Modern Rock Airplay chart — an important driver in Canada, where radio still plays a vital role for homegrown rock acts.

Like many other feats over the last two years, it shows that “Blame Brett” wasn’t a one-off. The Beaches are keeping the momentum going — hitting the road, showing off their personalities all over social media, releasing songs and, above all, being themselves.

Through all the label drama, TikTok breaks, and arena stages, the constant has been four women who grew up together and never stopped playing. That’s what makes this year their most monumental yet — and why they’re stepping into it with full confidence.

“When we finally had our big viral moment with ‘Blame Brett,’ we had been through so many years of hard work,” says Jordan. “We’d been on the van tours. We’d lugged a million items of gear across the country and back. We’d played I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of shows.

“You have to be ready for the moment when it comes. And we’re lucky that we were.”

The Beaches photographed by Lane Dorsey in Toronto in 2025.The Beaches photographed by Lane Dorsey in Toronto in 2025.