Katie Tupper is running her own race

Now, she’s released a breakout debut album, Greyhound, on Canada’s premiere indie label, Arts & Crafts, and toured it across a slew of dates across the US, Canada, and Europe . To have made it to this point is something Tupper never expected but the bigger she gets, the prouder she is of her Prairie roots — and the more she finds herself returning to them.

“I kind of thought either you made it as a big star and left the little city or you didn’t,” Tupper tells me. We’re chatting a week after Greyhound’s release, just as she finds her feet putting a full body of work out into the world. “I didn’t realize there were all these spaces in between for what being a musician could look like.” 

She got her start online, posting covers online to Twitter and Instagram as soon as she realized she both liked singing and was good at it. The numbers — at least in Saskatchewan terms — started to pile up. But the limitations of her vantage point held her back, at least at first.

“I was like, ‘Maybe I should do this as a job, because that feels nice. I love singing, I would love to be a singer one day.’ But then I was like, ‘That’s not real.’ So then I went to college,” she explains. There, she completed a marketing degree, keeping up her music on the side but never really intending to pursue it full time. 

Her dad, recognizing her talent, nearly begged her to wait on getting her degree. “He’s really creative, and I think he, in another life, should have been a musician,” she explains. At the time, she brushed him off. Almost a decade later, though, that steadfast support has proved essential and stabilizing as she’s begun reaching new heights post-Greyhound. Now based in Toronto, she still keeps a place in Saskatoon and gets back as often as possible. “I’ve had to work other jobs. While I was writing this album, I was working two serving jobs and trying to tour,” she says. “In my day to day, I’m living in my little apartment, working these serving jobs, and it feels so normal. But for my parents, they’re like, ‘Our daughter’s a star!’” 

Tupper’s shift to full-time music only came properly after the jolt of COVID. She’d finally graduated from her program and was trudging along through a marketing job she hated. She lasted six months in the job before quitting. Trying to figure out what to do next, she took a producer from the (albeit small) Saskatoon music scene up on his offer to have her sing overtop some of his mixes. Early wins, at that point, were all she was looking for. Those songs ended up doing well enough to pay her Saskatoon rent.

“That was an encouragement and showed me that there was a way to do this,” she says. Then, the world shut down. With nothing else to do, she had enough time on her hands to make her own solo project. She claims the EP that was a product of that period was “so bad” she hopes “it never sees the light of day.” But she must have done something right, because it made its way into the hands of an A&R at Arts & Crafts who signed her almost on the spot.

Around the same time, she set her sights on a new goal: Moving to Toronto. “My boyfriend is becoming a chiropractor, and he got into a school in Toronto. It was perfect because we had kind of sat down and I was like, ‘Either you get into this school and we move there together, or you don’t get in and I’m moving to Toronto,’” she remembers. Luck was on their side, and so, mid-pandemic as it became safe to start moving around again, the pair packed up Tupper’s Honda Civic and drove across the country.

Freshly in Canada’s creative capital, Tupper kept her head down working on her first EPs for A&C. “From being signed in 2021 to now putting out the [full-length] project in 2026, the last five years have just felt like research,” Tupper said. In the end, her business degree came in handy, giving her the critical background needed to figure out who in the industry could actually help her and who was just trying to rip her off for commission. The fearless independence it took her to pack up and move to Toronto helped her trek around Canada and the U.S. touring alone. Sure, she says, she made early mistakes, didn’t always double check the numbers, and took bad advice at times, but it all only served to help her come out stronger. And so as she approached writing Greyhound, she knew she was coming to the project from a position of context and strength.

She started writing the record in 2024, fully immersing herself in production for it throughout that year and into 2025. To bring it over the line, she brought back frequent collaborators Justice Der and BADBADNOTGOOD. 

Greyhound is, easily, Tupper’s most candid and mature work to date. Without sacrificing the lush R&B palette that compliments her striking alto, Tupper manages to reach moodier ground. Its classic instrumental arrangements are often complimented by tasteful electronic touches, a production choice that adds a new level of differentiation and texture. The record places her more firmly in the pantheon of experimental legends coming out of Toronto right now, a class that includes Charlotte Day Wilson, Daniel Caesar, and more. 

“I think my voice lands me in a certain lane, kind of similar to Charlotte, but right now she’s putting out some really cool, indie, interesting, almost electronic music, but still sounds so her,” Tupper says of her creative influences. Working with Justice Der and BADBADNOTGOOD helped her break out of the constraints of her own lane, opening up room for experimentation without sacrificing her own identity. Arriving at this new place sonically was, again, part of what she calls the “years of practice” that came before. Without them, she doesn’t think she would have been ready for a record she’s so proud of. 

Part of the experimentation of Greyhound also came in the exploration of deeper subject matter, heading to confessional places she’d previously been too nervous to go. On previous records, Tupper realized she’d often tried to hide her messages in metaphors, never quite wanting to cut to the heart of what she needed to get off her chest.

“My friend Mary Weitz, who came into the project halfway through, wrote on ‘Disappear’ and ‘Tennessee Heat’ and was editing some of the songs that I had already written to make sure that I was coming across with what I wanted to say,” Tupper says. “She kind of sat me down and was like, ‘You only know what your songs are about after I have talked to you for 15 minutes. You shroud everything in mystery, and we need to say real things, or else what’s the point?’” 

That conversation, Tupper says, changed the entire trajectory of the project. So much good pop music, she recognizes, is confessional and cutting. But she’d never wanted to approach that territory herself for fear of getting into gossip or being demeaned. 

“I wanted to have a project that was really honest, not gossipy, and I wanted to make sure that I could capture the nuance of the relationships [the songs are about],” she explains. 

That ethos shows up even in the record’s title, too. ‘Greyhound’ is meant to signify both betting on someone and participating in the chase. For Tupper, it’s primal, it’s raw, and it’s full of tension. 

“When I was thinking about that imagery, all the songs started to make sense and clicked. This whole album is just a conversation about those patterns that I’ve been in and that I’ve engaged in,” she explains. “At the end of writing the album, I realized I really had processed and grown a lot over the past few years.”