On Friday, November 6, The Belleville Club on Pinnacle Street hosts two songwriters who reached the same craft by very different routes.
Ten Kills the Pack, the project of Mississauga-born Sean Sroka, headlines, and Kingston’s Kyra opens as special guest. The show is part of the 2026 Quinte Arts Festival Music Fest.
Sroka arrives with a decade of reinvention behind him: a punk band, a stretch as a Toronto city-folk writer, a two-act concept album, a parting from his record label and a brand-new single released just over three weeks before the show. Kyra arrives with a debut album, a widening circuit of Ontario stages and a reputation built one small room at a time.
From Mississauga Punk Rehearsals to the Toronto City Folk of Sean Sroka
Sean Sroka grew up in Mississauga and cut his teeth in Toronto’s do-it-yourself music scene. He spent years touring and playing with bands of various genres, including a sludgy punk outfit whose edge never fully left his writing.
At one stage he paused music to focus on poetry, a detour that now reads as a preview of where his songs were headed. The break did not last, and in 2017 he went solo and began releasing music as Ten Kills the Pack.
The name belongs to a one-writer operation. Collaborators come and go from record to record, but the vision is Sroka’s alone.
In 2019 the project caught the attention of Nettwerk Music Group, the Canadian independent label, which signed him. A project that began in punk rehearsal spaces now had an established label behind it, and the catalogue since then sounds like those two worlds settling into one voice.
Nettwerk’s own profile cast him as a city songwriter in the fullest sense, someone who turns commuter life and cosmopolitan hustle into thoughtful indie-folk. The songs are written from the vantage of a person who lives among crowds and still feels the distance between people.
A Literary Songwriter Who Treats Every Three Minutes Like a Short Story
Sroka’s influences divide evenly between the record shelf and the bookshelf. The music side includes Bob Dylan, Laura Marling, Stan Rogers and The National, and the literary side includes Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara and e.e. cummings.
The combination shows. His songs read like compact short stories, built on confessional lyrics about the rough edges of the human condition.
The punk years explain the directness. Sroka writes with very little ornament between the feeling and the listener, then delivers it with the calm and kindness of folk.
Early press material described a writer more interested in the granular than the grandiose. The songs treat self-pity and self-destructive habits as proof of being human, suggest that happiness and sadness are two sides of one coin, and insist that healing takes time.
The approach has drawn steady praise. Exclaim! has called him “a leading voice in modern folk music,” and Atwood Magazine found his plain-spoken images of the search for contentment poignant and relatable.
Force Majeure and Life, Death, & Afterwards Build the City Songwriter’s Foundation
The first release under the Ten Kills the Pack name was the EP Force Majeure, which arrived in 2020. Its songs took shape during recording sessions in Toronto high-rises, so the sights, sounds and shapes of the city were woven into the music.
Singles led the way, including Drunk All the Time and You Just Want to Feel Whole Again in February 2020 and Talk My Ear Off that April. Indie88 later named Force Majeure one of its best overlooked albums of 2020.
The follow-up, Life, Death, & Afterwards, landed on February 26, 2021, and was produced by Dave Cerminara, whose credits include Father John Misty and Cold War Kids. Nettwerk described it as Sroka widening his scope to a search for interpersonal purpose, and for the clarity that comes with space and growth.
It is a short record, five songs and under nineteen minutes: Only Thinking of You, Mess, Body, Favourite Song and Childhood. Favourite Song had already surfaced as a single in September 2020.
Body is the clearest key to the record. It describes the fight with yourself when you try to change, and the weight you carry when the change does not come.
Together the two EPs set the template: intimate, observant writing, organic instrumentation and a refusal to dress up small moments as big ones. Everything on the later records grows from there.
Thank You for Trying Turns the Artist’s Journey Into a Two-Act Concept Album
The centrepiece of the catalogue is Thank You for Trying, a twelve-song concept album about the artist’s journey, released in two acts. Sroka co-produced it with Marcus Paquin, whose credits include The Weather Station, The National and Julia Jacklin.
The first act arrived on September 16, 2022, and the complete album followed on March 10, 2023, both through Nettwerk. Listeners lived with the first half for months before the full story landed, and standalone singles filled the gap between chapters.
Sroka plays a narrator whose stories loosely mimic his own experiences, a method that reviewers compared to Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, whose songs blur fact and fiction. The story refuses to hide the bumps and bruises while still carrying a message of hope.
Thank You for Trying: ACT I leaned into brutal honesty about mental anxieties, late-night wishes and life on the road. The sound moved between acoustic elegies and punk-leaning rockers, a reminder that the punk past never left.
The singles chart the range. Honestly, Fuck You arrived in April 2022, ahead of the first act, and Theo followed in September with Hannah Georgas among the backing vocalists.
God, Love, Prescriptions, and Politics came in November 2022, and You’d Like to Believe followed. The latter takes on the daily struggle with depression and the excuses sufferers use to rationalize it, carried by a string arrangement Sroka composed himself.
Lying in the Grass Thinking About Death arrived in January 2023 and offered his most hard-hitting performance yet, with throaty vocals and grungy guitars. Sroka explained that the song reversed his usual process: instead of shaping a large idea down to a few minutes, he started from small moments that contain whole worlds.
A video for Critics (Fifty Bucks) showed the other side of the record, an indie-folk tune that moves from quiet moments to a triumphant peak. Across the album he also folded in almost secret time changes, flowing modulations, gritty field recordings and short skits of produced life.
To mark the release he played a Toronto tour in secret spaces and small places across the city’s neighbourhoods. A live recording, A Few Songs Live off the Floor, followed in 2023 and captured the songs stripped down.
Leaving Nettwerk Behind and Going Independent With Girl of My Dreams
In early 2024 Sroka parted ways with his record label. His next release, girl of my dreams, came out on October 10, 2024, as his first independent single since the split.
He described the return to independence as familiar rather than frightening, a sense that he had never really left that part of his musical life. The freedom, he said, includes putting out a song when the season suits it.
Jay Som, also known as Melina Duterte and a producer and mixer known for work with boygenius and Fenne Lily, mixed the track. Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes, a previous collaborator, played drums.
The press description likened it to an alt-folk soundtrack for a nineties movie. Its origin is quieter: the chorus began as a self-deleting voice message Sroka sent to his partner, who was touring overseas, to help count down the days apart.
A video followed in November 2024, directed by Sroka himself and starring his puppy, Fenne. He called it the cutest video he had ever made.
Making and directing something on his own, he said, carried the same spirit as writing the song: going out and doing it for yourself. It is a useful clue to the artist who plays Belleville, a writer comfortable doing the work without a net.
Somebody Else and Edge of the Earth: Sroka’s Place in Aysanabee’s JUNO Story
Sroka’s writing has travelled well beyond his own records. He co-wrote Somebody Else with Derek Hoffman for Aysanabee’s EP Here and Now, one of the three songs behind Aysanabee’s win for Songwriter of the Year at the 2024 JUNO Awards.
The win, announced on March 23, 2024, in Halifax, made Aysanabee the first Indigenous artist to take both Songwriter of the Year and Alternative Album of the Year, the second trophy coming for Here and Now. Sroka’s credit sits on one of the three nominated songs, and his publicist bills him as a two-time JUNO winner.
The second credit is the title track of Aysanabee’s next record. Edge of the Earth, the song, is written by Hoffman, Aysanabee and Sroka, and it arrived as a single in January 2025, built on Aysanabee’s signature fingerstyle guitar.
The album Edge of the Earth followed on June 20, 2025, through Ishkōdé Records, and explores will, sacrifice and self-discovery. It won Alternative Album of the Year at the 2026 JUNO Awards in Hamilton this past March, alongside Contemporary Indigenous Artist or Group of the Year.
Recognition continued at the 2026 Canadian Folk Music Awards, where the album won Indigenous Songwriter of the Year and its title track was nominated for Single of the Year. Aysanabee is now a four-time JUNO winner, and a co-written title track sits at the heart of the latest run.
Producing Hannah Georgas and Writing Time Machine for TALK Beyond His Own Records
Behind the console, Sroka co-produced I’d Be Lying If I Said I Didn’t Care, the 2023 album by his partner Hannah Georgas, released on August 25. It was the first record Georgas produced as lead, taking the reins after her 2020 album All That Emotion was made alongside Aaron Dessner.
The sessions took place in Toronto with a trove of analogue equipment. Players included James McAlister on drums, Graham Walsh on synth and bass, and Gabe Wax on drum programming.
Georgas has five full-length albums, five JUNO nominations and three Polaris Music Prize nods to her name. She is also releasing music with a new project called So Faint, with an album due this fall.
Sroka also helped write Time Machine, the comeback single from JUNO-winning artist TALK. The songwriting credits list him alongside Derek Hoffman, among others.
The song was TALK’s first single in three years and his first release after signing with Big Loud Rock. It debuted on Billboard Canada’s Modern Rock Airplay chart, a guitar-led ballad that builds into a distorted, power-chord chorus.
Hoffman appears next to Sroka on Somebody Else, Edge of the Earth and Time Machine, which points to a durable writing partnership. It is the kind of quiet, repeated collaboration that rarely makes headlines but shapes the sound of a scene.
We Both Care Arrives With a Sweater Built for Twelve and a Question
On October 14, Ten Kills the Pack released We Both Care, his first new single since girl of my dreams two years earlier. Charles Spearin of Broken Social Scene and Hannah Georgas perform on it, and Jay Som mixed it, the same mixer who shaped his last single.
Sroka describes the song as one he felt strongly while writing. Its subject is the divide between people who care about the same things, and whether that divide grows or shrinks as each person changes.
In the release notes he asks, “How will you get through to each other, even on the small things?” The answer he offers is that caring enough to be there is the main thing.
The production is deliberately brighter than the idea. Sroka calls it boppy and fun, and that gap between a light sound and a serious subject has long been close to a signature for the project.
The video takes the lyric about stretch sweaters literally. Sroka partnered with Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck to build a sweater that fits eight to twelve people, and the cast wears it together.
Walsh is a familiar name in this circle. He produced Hannah Georgas’s 2012 self-titled album and played synth and bass on her 2023 record, so the sweater is a studio friendship turned into a prop.
The image works as an argument, since everyone inside the sweater has to move in the same direction. Belleville will hear the song just over three weeks after its release, while it is still brand new.
Belleville Becomes Home: Beautiful View and the Songwriters Building a Scene
This show is closer to a home game than a tour stop. Sroka and Georgas moved to the Bay of Quinte region and have been building musical infrastructure there ever since, and local coverage calls them Belleville transplants.
Together they founded the Beautiful View Music Festival, a boutique event spread across downtown Belleville venues. For inspiration they looked to the CBC Music Festival and the Newport Folk Festival, aiming for a listening event that felt welcoming, intentional and rooted in community.
They also know the geography. As touring musicians they are familiar with the 401 run between Toronto and Montreal or Ottawa, a route that sometimes stops in Kingston but rarely in Belleville.
The first edition took place on Saturday, September 13, 2025. Free afternoon performances by Cedric Noel, Justin Rutledge, Burs, Boyhood, Fraser, May Shukla and Julia Finnegan filled venues including UpFront Café, The Belleville Club, The Kafana and Evolve Wellness Studio, and a ticketed evening show at Capers Restaurant featured Julie Doiron, Hayden and Bells Larsen.
The second edition ran September 18 and 19, 2026, with Sarah Harmer, Jeremie Albino and Ada Lea headlining and Cadence Weapon, Thanya Iyer, Lisa Bozikovic, Vic Louis and Letdowns among the performers. A Kingston promoter credits the pair with creating momentum for live music in the region.
Kyra Brings a Kingston Songwriter’s Voice and Guitar to the Opening Slot
Opening the night is Kyra, a singer-songwriter from Kingston, Ontario, just down Highway 401 from Belleville.
Kingston Live describes her as known for exceptional songwriting and storytelling and for captivating, intimate live performances.
Her instruments are guitar and voice, and the heartfelt melodies and dynamic vocal range are what promoters keep singling out. According to her own account she has been writing songs since childhood. That long apprenticeship shows in material that treats personal detail as the whole point rather than decoration.
Her sets lean on the oldest format in folk: a writer, a guitar and a room quiet enough to hear both. It is a demanding format, because nothing is there to hide behind.
Kyra’s debut album, Skin to Skin, came out in 2025. The tracklist includes Sing to Me, I Am a Diamond, My Man, Ocean, I’ve Seen a Ghost, Ego and California.
Kingston Stages, Community Radio and the Slow Build of a Local Following
Kingston has a deep bench of songwriters, and Kyra has earned her place in it the slow way. She plays the rooms, writes the songs and lets the work accumulate.
The Broom Factory, at 305 Rideau Street, has been a regular stop. The space grew out of an initiative led by the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, the Kingston Film Office, KPP Concerts and RAW Design, with the aim of building a community hub for film, music and design in the Inner Harbour neighbourhood.
CFRC 101.9 FM, broadcasting from Queen’s University, featured her music on its Yellow Brit Road show in May 2025 and caught her live alongside Kingston act Tiny Horse.
Her path to this stage runs through more than one city. In August 2024 she played Ottawa’s Art House Café alongside Jessy Lindsay and Kaiday, billed as a Toronto-based folk artist whose musical journey began in her hometown of Kingston.
One of her most recent dates before Belleville came at Ottawa’s Rainbow Bistro, a ByWard Market room that has stood on Murray Street since 1984. She shared the bill with Ottawa singer-songwriters Hannah Vig and Monique Messier for a night of acoustic music.
What Two Songwriters at Different Points on One Road Offer a Listening Room
Put side by side, Sroka and Kyra illustrate two stages of the same long project.
One has a catalogue spanning EPs, a concept album, a label exit and a fresh single, and the other has a debut album and a growing circuit.
What they share is a belief in the song as the unit of everything. Neither lean on production tricks in a room like The Belleville Club, and both build their sets on personal detail, direct feeling and the quiet that makes it audible.
For Sroka the night arrives in the town where he lives, in a venue he has already helped put on the festival map, with a single that is barely three weeks old. For Kyra it is a chance to show a new room what Kingston has been hearing.
Ten Kills the Pack with special guest Kyra plays Friday, November 6, at 7:00 pm at The Belleville Club, 210 Pinnacle Street, Belleville, in a licensed room with limited seating.
