Noah Derksen - Mercy on the Skyline (album)

The award-winning Canadian roots / americana singer-songwriter returns with his fourth studio album

Noah Derksen / Mercy On The Skyline - artwork

– Release Date: 21^st May –

Are You Living Your Life

Chuck Palahniuk

Walking Home (feat. FONTINE)

Who Do You Wanna Be (explicit)

Nothing Goes Your Way

Mercy on the Skyline (feat. Lori McKenna)

Lover I'm Gonna Miss You (feat. May Erlewine)

What Lights Up Your Dark

Still Haven't Figured It Out

My Mother's Voice

Press Assets (lyrics, images, press release, embed codes etc)

“Thoughtful and insightful… Derksen has mastered the art of drawing in his audience” Americana UK

“Noah Derksen makes strikingly earnest music” Stylus Mag

“A melodious rasp that only a handful of singers have been blessed with” UpToHear

One of Canada’s most distinctive voices, Noah Derksen is a singer-songwriter whose luminous blend of folk, country and indie defies easy categorization. Emerging from Winnipeg’s indie scene and now based in Montreal, Noah was named a finalist in SiriusXM’s Top of the Country competition and awarded Canadian Folk Music’s Emerging Artist of the Year.

Today, he is thrilled to announce his fourth studio album, Mercy on the Skyline, set for release May 21st, 2026 via AWAL.

A soulful, reflective record shaped by collaboration and care, Mercy on the Skyline was produced by Murray Pulver alongside Derksen himself. It was recorded largely live in a room with a close-knit group of musicians, emphasizing nuance, interplay and subtle emotional detail. Featuring contributions from Lori McKenna, May Erlewine and FONTINE, alongside a backbone of Winnipeg’s finest players, the record sounds lived-in, human and intentional.

“Life is about being in community,” Derksen says, and Mercy on the Skyline is a reflection of that. Collected in living rooms and kitchens across continents, the songs were later immortalized together in the studio, where tiny moments (a Wurlitzer flourish, an organ swell, a dynamic shift) could only exist because everyone was present, listening and responding in real time.

Fearlessly sincere and quietly powerful, Mercy on the Skyline captures Noah Derksen at his most grounded and expansive. A songwriter attuned to the emotional weight of ordinary moments, his music rewards close listening and returns the care it’s given.

Track Descriptions (by the artist):

Are You Living Your Life
There’s a few recurring themes on this album, one being this notion of “are you living life to your fullest potential”, and this song feels like a great opener to start this exploration. I grew up in a generation of kids who thought they were unique and special; who believed we were destined for some form of greatness. The older I get the more I wrestle with this: am I doing the best I can, and living the best I can. Am I living to my potential? It sounds a little self-centred, and goddamn it really is. This song wrestles with the cyclical inevitability of life — despite our perceived importance of ourselves, oceans beat down on rocks and grind them into sand, sand presses together and over millions of years turns back to rock. I love, I lose, I love again. I fall down, I get back up. That’s living.I wrote the bridge of this song during pre-production — playing it through with the band for the first time, and it just felt like something else needed to happen. We kept jamming it out, and listening back to the demo I heard myself mumble sing “shadow from the east, white flag beckons peace”. I tinkered away for the next month and this bridge emerged from the stone, which is my favourite lyrical moment of the album.
Chuck Palahniuk
I mean, crudely put, this song is about wanting to hookup with my ex-girlfriend. Full stop. About returning the little remnants of her place in my life: books that I had borrowed, jewelry and clothes and a toothbrush left at my house. Breakups are effing hard. You know someone so deeply and they know you, then one day it just stops. I wrote this song as part of a weekly song club, where you have to submit a new song every week lest you get booted out. The night of the deadline I sat down and wrote the literal images of my day. “Walking down the street with a bag of your shit” was the first thing that popped into my head, and the rest spilled out rather quickly. So many songs from this new record took root in this way — just because I had to sit down and see what came out. The song’s title comes from an obscure reference in the first verse: a borrowed book in need of return, authored by the absurdist and often dark-leaning Chuck Palahniuk. There’s so much poetry in the literal.
Walking Home
I walked the streets of Winnipeg endlessly throughout the pandemic. The city centres at the fork of two rivers: the Assiniboine and the Red. Winnipeg is described as Canada’s heartbeat — its geographical and cultural centre, where the effects of colonial past are impossible to ignore. It’s not always a pretty place. But it’s beautiful just the same, and has shaped me so deeply.I walked along its riverbanks, giving way to crumbling city streets where addicts and hipsters share space. And every few weeks some kid would try to fight me or rob me. I would politely refuse, and we’d both go on our way.I’m grateful for Winnipeg and everyone in it.
Who Do You Wanna Be
This is another song from the streets of Winnipeg, observing the mundane and beautiful world as it goes by. I’m constantly amazed by people’s resolve in the Canadian prairies, where it gets to -50C consistently in the winter. It’s a city that hasn’t changed in 100 years, the same characters doing the same things day after day, year after year. It always feels like it’s on the cusp of greatness, which it never quite reaches due to neglect, oversight by city planners, or just plain heartbreak. Therein lies the disconnect between who we are and who we want to be.
Nothing Goes Your Way
This is my subconscious speaking, those pervasive and persuasive thoughts that show the deepest and most selfish parts of yourself. It’s not anecdotal, in the true sense: this didn’t actually happen literally. Just an honest reflection of what goes on in the deepest darkest corner of my mind. Life sucks sometimes. Get over it.
Mercy on the Skyline
I wrote this song just before my 30th birthday, first writing the chorus one evening in Nashville, the next morning uncovering the story of the song with Brian McKenna and Tamara Laurel. I look at it now and see a deep reflection of my 20s: of the dreams I’d had and of the love I’d lost. All the while staring forward into the next decade of life, seeing the “mercy” up ahead: the letting go of past pains, if only I could let myself be so brave.It was a long search to try to find the right voice to sing harmonies, until I asked Brian if his mom would be interested. He sent it to her, and she said she’d love to. And that’s how the incredible Lori McKenna got to sing harmonies on my song. I’m such a fan.
Lover I’m Gonna Miss You
This was meant to be a light-hearted country song, which came to me after a rather uninspiring co-write in Nashville. We toiled with it in the studio, even re-recorded after the first time didn’t sit quite right. But it follows the most important lesson I’ve learned in music: be true to feeling. From the first shred of an idea to the final note in the studio, follow the emotional feeling regardless of fact (or technical performance).I caught up with my songwriting hero May Erlewine in Michigan, and her harmonies brought everything together and still gives me shivers. A song is a beautiful thing.
What Lights Up Your Dark
The chorus first came to me in London, where I had a week booked in an airbnb and I had the most miserable of times. I was sick as hell, and there was a family crisis going on back at home. “Tell me what do you do when you’re lonely, how do you speak when you can’t breathe // tell me how to deal with the silence, when it fills in the cracks and you’re blinded, cuz I’m finding it hard”.
I brought this song to Brian McKenna on an impromptu trip to Nashville, and together we added a verse and a bridge. It ended up less soul-crushing than what I hear in my voice in the early voice memos, which is probably a good thing. I don’t want to relive that.
Still Haven’t Figured It Out
This is something of a love song, an amalgamation of the loves I’ve had and some I wish I’d had, through the lens of people who have been together for a long long time. It almost didn’t make the record, but my producer Murray really resonated with it, and insisted. And here we are.
My Mother’s Voice
My mom had moved countries, had 2 kids, and been pregnant 4 times by the time she was my age. What a great sacrifice that is, what a toll, and yet still life feels immensely simply in the montage of my childhood memories. I wrote this song with Taylor Janzen on a Saturday afternoon in Winnipeg, and she was able to draw out this intensely personal and honest story. I don’t think I could have been that vulnerable with myself if I was trying to write alone that day.