Four women walk into a Kingston rehearsal space carrying decades of stage time between them. There is a metalcore singer who once toured the continent, a songwriter who has been releasing records for two decades, a comedian turned percussionist, and a concert promoter who has booked some of the biggest names in Canadian indie rock.
Together they are HAG, a witch punk band from Kingston, Ontario.
The four members are Angela Stever, Megan Hamilton, Dee Prescott, and Moira Demorest, and their own biography keeps the pitch short: perimenopausal fire meets the waters of the moon.
HAG blend rituals, spells, and witchcraft into fast, funny, furious punk songs, then deliver them in four-part harmony. Their live shows have been selling out, and across the summer and fall of 2026 they rolled out three singles the band frames as a spell trilogy. Each of the four members arrived with her own Kingston following, built on solo records, old bands, radio shows, and a concert promotion company. HAG is where all four followings collide.
This is the story of everyone in the coven, everyone joining them on stage this Halloween, and how four of Kingston’s most experienced musicians ended up in the loudest new band in the city.
Four Women, Four Archetypes
HAG describe themselves the way a tarot reader lays out a spread: four unique archetypes, each one essential to the reading.
Their backgrounds cover punk, folk, pop, comedy, and radio, and the band calls the result crone era energy for a world that feels like it is imploding.
The sound matches the résumés: punk supplies the speed and the shouting, folk supplies the harmonies and the storytelling, and pop supplies hooks that stick around long after the rage has done its work.
All four members sing, and the four-part harmony is the band’s signature weapon. It lets a chorus land like a choir and a threat at the same time, which is more or less the whole HAG idea in a single sound.
Nobody in HAG is a beginner, and the band plays like it, with the looseness of a group that has nothing left to prove and no interest in behaving.
Dee Prescott Brings the Thrash
Every supergroup has a member whose old band makes younger musicians sit up straighter, and in HAG that is Dee Prescott.
Prescott first played bass in I Hate Sally and then returned in 2005 to take over as the Kingston metalcore band’s singer.
I Hate Sally formed in Kingston in 2000 and built a national following the slow way, through relentless touring and records that kept getting heavier and smarter. The band released its debut, Sickness of the Ages, in 2004, followed by The Plague EP in 2005.
The breakthrough came with Don’t Worry Lady, recorded in the spring of 2006 and released that fall by Toronto label Underground Operations. Vagrant Records took the album into the United States in June 2007 and the United Kingdom the following October, and I Hate Sally closed out 2007 with a split EP alongside Quebec’s GFK.
Exclaim! praised Don’t Worry Lady for combining metal, punk, and hardcore into a thick, crushing, melodic sludge, and singled out Prescott’s throat-wrenching vocals as the band’s secret weapon. The album was mixed by Kurt Ballou of Converge and mastered by Nick Zampiello, two of the heaviest names in North American hardcore, and I Hate Sally called it a day on July 10, 2008, eight years after it started.
Prescott never left the stage for long.
In 2015 she co-founded Forty Seven Teeth with Jesse Aylsworth, Anna Robertson, and Joseph Harvey, taking the name from a fact she had read on a bubble gum wrapper: a mosquito has 47 teeth.
The band released its first single, All the Feels, in 2016 and an EP a year later, then came back from a 2018 hiatus as a trio under the name No Guff. Pandemic jam sessions under that name produced Apologies, sixteen songs built from old memories and the messiness of youth, recorded and mixed by Jesse’s father, Tim Aylsworth, in his home studio in three days with a strict limit of three takes per song.
An October 2025 appearance on the Kingston Live Podcast found the trio sharing a new song, Portland Flower, from a further album in the works.
Two decades after she first picked up a bass in this scene, Prescott is somehow in the two most exciting bands in Kingston at once. HAG gets her voice at full roar, now wrapped in three other harmonies instead of a wall of guitars.
Megan Hamilton, Two Decades Deep
Megan Hamilton has been writing and releasing songs in Kingston for more than twenty years, and her chapter of the HAG story starts long before punk entered the picture.
She is a singer-songwriter first, with a catalogue of solo records and a reputation as one of the city’s finest voices.
Her 2013 EP Snow Moon began a collaboration with noted producer Jim Bryson, and the partnership deepened on Forty Warm Streams To Lead Your Wings, the album she released in September 2015.
She wrote most of that record while anticipating a milestone fortieth birthday, married with a young daughter and a music career she had never pictured for herself at twenty-six.
Hamilton’s favourite story from those years sounds invented and is not. In 2005 she opened for My Morning Jacket in Toronto on the band’s Z tour, stepping in when scheduled opener Kathleen Edwards could not play the show.
It was her first time performing with a full band, and the band she assembled that night included guitarist Shelby Lamb. No pictures or footage of the set exist, a gap in the record Hamilton tells on herself with obvious delight. The Lamb connection stuck: Hamilton contributes to the Shelby Lamb Band, and Lamb adds vocals to Hamilton’s own Feudal Ladies Club album on Bandcamp.
A CBC Ontario Morning segment once marvelled at Hamilton’s pace, after she wrote and recorded six songs in only four days. Speed and volume were never going to be problems when punk came calling.
Hamilton also hosts Embracing Enchantment, a podcast exploring spirituality and hope on the Women in Media network. In HAG, the witch half of witch punk is not a costume for her; it is the same curiosity she has been following on mic for years, now with distortion pedals.
Ange Stever, From Comedy to Percussion
Angela Stever is billed as Ange in the band, and her road to the drum kit ran through two other stages entirely: comedy and radio.
The Kingston Live Podcast summed up her chapter in its episode contents as “from comedy to percussion,” and both halves of that phrase are still part of her job in HAG.
Stever is a familiar voice in Kingston media and has hosted episodes of the Kingston Live Podcast herself, including a 2025 episode celebrating three generations of women carrying the city’s music scene forward. She knows exactly how a Kingston music story is supposed to be told, because telling them is her trade.
That makes her the band’s built-in megaphone. When HAG announced their first single in August 2026, the promotional reel went out on Stever’s own account, cutting live footage from the Broom Factory together with the band’s battle cry for feminists everywhere: and then you discover HAG.
On stage, the comedy timing turns into percussion, and the percussion turns every chorus into a chant the whole room can join.
Moira Demorest Plays Both Sides of the Stage
Moira Demorest might be the most connected musician in Kingston, and she is certainly the only member of HAG who also books the band’s Halloween show.
Moira Demorest is a pianist, keyboardist, guitarist, and singer who has spent most of her life at the piano and most of her career lifting up other artists.
For over a decade she toured and performed with PELT, the feminist dance punk band that won K-ROCK 105.7’s inaugural Bandslam competition. PELT played Canadian Music Week, Pop Montreal, and North by Northeast, and shared stages with Bedouin Soundclash, The Golden Dogs, Tokyo Police Club, and Wide Mouth Mason.
Off stage, Demorest co-founded KPP Concerts, the Kingston concert production company presenting this Halloween show, and she has produced live concerts for nearly twenty years.
Her own writing runs in a different direction from witch punk, drawing on influences from Philip Glass to Laura Jane Grace across piano-led songs with a rich mezzo voice.
Her debut solo release, this is me being nice, arrived in November 2020, and her stage work includes the award-winning Fringe production Anybody Can Be Pussy Riot.
Demorest also serves as the music officer with Tourism Kingston, the person the city itself trusts to champion its music scene.
This past summer she was one of the city’s musical voices through Forever Hip, Kingston’s season-long celebration of The Tragically Hip, the hometown band whose final concert turned the city into a national gathering place in 2016. In 2022 she debuted yet another band, The Apricots, at the Back to the Farm festival, fronting it alongside Marc Garniss, who played guitar in Dee Prescott’s old band, I Hate Sally.
That is the thing about HAG’s Kingston: everybody’s history runs through everybody else’s band. The coven did not form out of strangers; it formed out of a scene these four women spent decades building together.
The Spell Trilogy: Downtown, So Tired, and Witches
HAG spent 2026 casting in public, releasing three singles the band presents as a spell trilogy. Each one landed with the timing of a ritual, and together they make a tidy introduction to everything the band is about.
The first spell was Downtown, introduced at the end of August with a video collage under the banner “Welcome to the Matriarchy!” The clip cuts between rehearsal footage and live shots from the Broom Factory, shows the four members in matching hats, and ends on band merchandise, including hats carrying a flame-like HAG logo and a shirt reading “Fuck the Patriarchy.”
The second single, So Tired, arrived on September 22, 2026, the day of the autumn equinox, because this band does not miss a meaningful date. The Spill Magazine called HAG a Kingston supergroup in its coverage and described the song as an NSFW rage against the patriarchy, bad news partners, and the state of the world in general.
The rage comes wrapped in the band’s best trick: a catchy chorus of four-part harmonies repeating “Go f**k yourself tonight,” sung sweetly enough to hum and pointedly enough to mean it.
Even the single’s artwork is a spell of sorts, a distressed black-and-white collage of forest, lit candles, and a faded childhood photograph, framed by a skull and crossbones. The band calls it a great song to sing at the top of your lungs straight into the void, and a song about all the ways people spend too much time caring what other people think.
The third spell, Witches, materialized on October 10, 2026. The band’s teaser aimed it squarely at fans of tarot, poisonous plants, and creepy origin stories, and signed off with the trilogy’s mission statement in all caps: crush the patriarchy.
Halloween Night at the Broom Factory: Who’s Ready to Join the Coven?
KPP Concerts presents HAG at the Broom Factory, 305 Rideau Street in Kingston, on Saturday, October 31, 2026, with Ace of Wands and Christina Foster completing the bill.
The show starts at 7:30 p.m., doors open at 7:00 p.m., and admission is $15. The night is all ages and licensed, set up as a general admission standing-room show, with a limited number of seats available on request and for patrons with accessibility or mobility needs, and alcohol is served to patrons aged 19 and over with valid ID.
The room itself has a past life worth the trip. The Broom Factory is the former Bailey Broom Factory, a building more than a century old that sat derelict for decades and stood set for demolition in 2017 before RAW Design rescued and revitalized it, keeping many of its original heritage features.
The project that brought the building back is led by the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, the Kingston Film Office, KPP Concerts, and RAW Design, as a community hub for film, music, design, and the arts in Kingston’s Inner Harbour neighbourhood. The renovated building is completely electric and net zero ready, built on a remediated former brownfield site.
The Broom Factory is a fully accessible, inclusive, all-ages room with an in-house café serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and public transit passes right by the door.
The venue sits about a twelve-to-fifteen-minute walk from Princess Street, and free parking is available in its lot and on the surrounding streets.
Earlier this month, the same space hosted Kingston’s Witch Market, a marketplace of witchy wares and handcrafted goods from local vendors, which makes a witch punk headliner on Halloween less a booking than a homecoming.
Ace of Wands Brings the Tarot Full Circle
Halloween’s middle set belongs to Ace of Wands, a Toronto dream rock trio that has been building its own fantastical world since 2017.
The band is led by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lee Rose, a classically trained violinist who alternates between violin and guitar while simultaneously playing synth-bass on foot pedals. Anna Mernieks plays guitar and Jody Brumell plays drums, and the three of them make a sound far larger than a trio has any right to make.
Rose had been carrying the songs for years before that first show in 2017. She started playing in bands at sixteen and began writing on her own in 2016, and a cross-Canada tour playing violin for Ron Hawkins and The Do Good Assassins, opening for Blue Rodeo, convinced her to pursue her own project in earnest.
Mernieks and Brumell completed the band, and Rose credits their chemistry with giving the material the depth and grit it had been waiting for. Nine years on, the trio’s reputation rests on explosive, charismatic live performances, astonishing musicianship, and gothic rock aesthetics.
Rose named the band by pulling a tarot card while the project was forming, and the Ace of Wands came up: a spark of creativity and an intensity of emotion tied together.
On a Halloween bill headlined by a band that reads itself as a tarot spread, that origin story stops sounding like a coincidence.
Ace of Wands released their third studio album, Future Wave, in 2026, recording thirteen tracks at ProGold Studios in Toronto with Canadian rock legend Ian Blurton producing. The album turns on time itself: its fickleness, its omnipresence, and the way the past and the future lean on the present, and its single Edge of the Edge began as a tender voice memo about a night at a friend’s cottage on Georgian Bay before the trio turned it wild and unrestrained. The trio’s sound evokes the art rock of PJ Harvey, the orchestral pop of Kate Bush, and the alt rock fuzz of Nirvana.
Christina Foster Opens the Night
Opening the show is the quietest name on the poster and one of the deepest résumés in Kingston music.
Christina Foster has been singing and dancing since childhood, has released albums both solo and with her former band The Lady Racers, and has sung with Rueben deGroot’s Rocket Surgery since 2012.
Her current trio, Foster, Shea & Sudac, has been together since 2023. The harmony folk trio is a supergroup in its own right, and their three voices stack into the kind of close harmony that runs in this city’s water supply.
Her bandmates bring followings of their own. Savannah Shea is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and music teacher who received a City of Kingston Mayor’s Arts Award in 2023, helps run the city’s Youth Open Mic and Kingston Pop Choir, and pushed the trio into existence in the first place.
Anna Sudac is a singer-songwriter, playwright, and director who has worked with production companies including Peerless Productions, which creates stage work with neurodiverse and other disabled artists. She also starred in Jay Middaugh’s 2017 film Live in Kingston, a movie that played a key role in the formation of Kingston Live itself.
Foster also works with Kingston Frontenac Music Together, which provides music programming for infants and young children across the region. The woman opening Kingston’s witchiest Halloween show spends her days teaching the city’s youngest musicians their first songs, and there is no better summary of how this scene actually works.
Foster has her own working definition of punk, offered in a trio interview about the fear of getting things wrong on stage. Doing it anyway, she says, is “more punk rock than not doing it because you’re afraid.”
Halloween Night at the Broom Factory: Who’s Ready to Join the Coven?
HAG have played the Broom Factory before and on October 31st, they make their eagerly anticipated return.
The harmonies are rehearsed, the trilogy is complete, and Halloween is the one night of the year when the rest of the city dresses like HAG already does. Kingston’s witch punks, Toronto’s tarot trio, and one of the finest harmony singers in the city, all for fifteen dollars: the coven is accepting new members.
Get your tickets here to HAG at the Broom Factory in Kingston on Saturday, October 31st, 2026.
