Ada Lea: the end is a wave, seven songs and no filler
A year after a sixteen-track album, the Montreal songwriter returns with a seven-song digital release on Saddle Creek, a dance beat, and a Leonard Cohen cover.
BY JOLT Staff · AUG 14 2026 · 3 min readthe end is a wave is the shortest record Ada Lea has released and the first of hers that treats brevity as a decision. Seven songs, twenty-one minutes and change, nothing stretched to fill a side. It arrives a year after a sixteen-track record, and where that one sprawled, this one closes ranks and gets out.
Ada Lea is Alexandra Levy, a Montreal songwriter and visual artist on Saddle Creek. What We Say in Private landed in 2019, One Hand on the Steering Wheel the Other Sewing a Garden followed in 2021 and made the Polaris Music Prize longlist. Then came the long one, sixteen tracks in August 2025. Everything here reads as a reaction to it: fewer songs, shorter ones, no room to hide.
“In 2020, I’d just finished reading The Neapolitan Quartet.”
The release is digital, out August 12 through Saddle Creek, streaming and on Bandcamp for seven dollars with downloads in 24-bit/96kHz. Levy has tied the record's thinking about friendship back to 2020 and the Neapolitan Quartet.
Seven songs, and the first one moves. 'copycat' puts a dance beat under a lyric about envy: two shapes drawn, a friend whose songs are feared, and the line 'I'm nothing but a copycat' left sitting there. It is the one moment here built to move, and the narrator stays still inside it. 'i've never been in love' works the same problem from the other side: a party where everybody else is paired, years of trying, and then somebody who stuck. The title promises one song and the ending delivers another, which is the sharpest turn on the album.
'the evergreen, the birch' gives the record its name and its best images: evergreen and birch, a window and a car window, a friend, a snow-capped mountain, a canyon drawn in crayon, an oil spill, kindness, roses being grown, and the line about the end being a wave. 'okay, ok, o.k!' argues with itself until the words fail and a vase goes out a window, and what is left to weigh is trust. 'phases' counts: benches, calling, space, mushrooms, flowers, time pulling the record through a season. Then 'chelsea hotel #2', the cover, Leonard Cohen's, the longest thing on the record. Closing it is 'i miss the heavy shoulders of the trees': a clock, church bells, a cat, coffee, a river, night, baby teeth, fingers in water.
This is for people who read the lyric sheet before the second play, and for anyone who has kept the 2019 and 2021 records closer than the sixteen-track one. Put it on when you want the words first. If you want a record that builds, or one that earns a long runtime, it will read as a sketchbook: seven ideas, most of them finished.
What holds it back is the shape of the last stretch. The longest track on the record is somebody else's song, and it lands with two to go, which hands the emotional center of a short album to a cover. Then the closer is a fragment that ends on an image instead of a landing, and the record stops short.
None of that undoes the writing. Seven songs, one beat built to move, and a run of images about friends and seasons that most writers would need twice the runtime to land. Three and a half out of five. The short record is the harder one, and this is the one to start with.
