Cam Kahin Stage Dives Into Sweaty Catharsis

The once small-town songwriter turns restlessness into an alt-punk epic on his debut album, CHUG.

By Sydney Eliot

Photos by Oscar Tam

Published on February 4, 2026

For Cam Kahin, Dunnville, Ontario was a place he learned to escape long before he ever left it. Home to about 6,000 people, the rural Southern Ontario town became a melancholy backdrop where his musical interests and creative instincts first took shape.

“If you drive through, it’s the most picturesque cottage country town,” he explains, sitting down with RANGE at Lost in Tokyo Café on Queen St. West in Toronto. “But there’s definitely a pretty bleak underbelly that you don’t really see.”

Yearning for an exit from the mundanity and small-mindedness of his surroundings, Kahin says growing up isolated eventually pushed him inside — and very online. With the absence of any real alternative music scene in Dunnville, he searched for a broader community on the internet, which he describes as “the catalyst for finding all the foundational bands and sub-genres that I fell in love with.”

Having moved to Toronto a few years ago, the now 24-year-old Kahin recalls being a teenager convincing his mom to take him to hardcore punk shows in Hamilton. “Props to her for letting me go,” he laughs, dubbing her the coolest mom ever. “That would have definitely been scary as a parent.”

Enraptured by the frenetic energy and reckless abandon of DIY Canadian hardcore bands like Counterparts and Single Mothers, he became obsessed with sounds that would go on to inform and inspire his own music. So, when long-time childhood friend and bassist Aidan Collins got a guitar and learned to play, Kahin was all in. “He would come over and play these riffs and I would think ‘I need to learn that. That’s the coolest shit ever.’”

It’s these experiences — skateboarding through empty parking lots, scraping loose change out of the laundry machine to go see Green Day, and finding artistic refuge in his bedroom — that delineate Kahin’s debut album, CHUG.

Released on Jan. 23 under Dine Alone Records, CHUG is bursting at the seams with hardcore, emo, and pop punk sensibilities. The self-reflective 10-track project explores the hypothetical: who would he be if he had never left his small town?

The tone of CHUG sits in that familiar ache of wanting out: worn down, feeling spent — but stubbornly persisting. The visuals for the album, shot by videographer Adit Dixit, depict a bruised and beaten Kahin, with a scraped up face and missing teeth. Kahin says this imagery connects to the narrative of the album as well as the name, embodying the instinct to push forward when stopping would be easier.

“To me, it’s like when you’re so beaten down that all you can think about is one foot in front of the other… just keep chugging.”

While his lyrics reckon with feeling out of place, Kahin has certainly found a home on stage. At his Toronto show the night after the album’s release, he is completely comfortable, animated and confident, whipping an already buzzy Hard Luck Bar crowd into even more of a frenzy. In between his newest songs, like pop-punk earworm “yeah right!” and the viscerally raw rock ballad “limbo,” he plays some older favourites, which the crowd loudly and enthusiastically sing back to him.

On heavier post-hardcore tracks like “birds” and “nicotine,” a collection of ricocheting bodies forms in front of the stage, and at one point Kahin leaves his microphone behind to climb down and join in.

In conversation the week before his release show at Hard Luck, he expresses how much his experiences at live shows as a teenager have shaped how he performs. Sipping an americano, he describes how being in those spaces solidified his love and need for music.

“I was in the basement of Club Absinthe, being lifted by like 40 year old guys crowd surfing. I think if that didn’t make me want to do it for real, which I felt like I already kind of did, it definitely kind of shaped what I wanted the live show to feel like.”

Watching Kahin perform, it is clear that he deeply understands the kind of joy and release that being in a mosh pit can provide. He reflects on how he felt like he needed that kind of outlet, especially in a time of isolation and restlessness.

“[Performing live] felt very cathartic for a reason that I couldn’t identify at the time. But I think it was the energy and sort of angst that echoed a lot of what I was feeling.”

That kind of impossible-to-ignore anxiety can be heard sonically throughout the album, with gritty guitar and loud building drums on tracks like “can’t hide from you” and “come around.” If this sound wasn’t born purely from Kahin’s personal experience, it was amplified tenfold in the downtown studio where most of the album was recorded. Small, cramped, and completely windowless, Kahin and musicians David Steinmetz and Jeremiah Pick hunkered down in the cave-like room for a month straight, diving deep into the album.

“We tried some different things, just did a whole bunch of ear candy, weird, cool, synthy stuff,” he explains. “We just wanted to get as weird as possible.”

Kahin likens the essence of CHUG to the physical sensation of sweating — whether that’s due to bodily exertion or sheer panic.

Ironically, outside of music, Kahin is a self-proclaimed chill dude who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He goes to the same Tim Hortons every morning, where the employees know him as the “medium regular coffee guy.” He raves about the abundance of things to do in Toronto. “Having a movie theater I can walk to is huge for me,” Kahin says. “I definitely abuse that. We didn’t even have a Walmart where I grew up, just farms everywhere.”

Moving to the city has changed things for him personally as well. “It’s the first time I’ve had kind of a community of people that I feel are pretty like-minded and cool and open and love art,” he says. “And that definitely influences what I listen to and what I’m consuming, which in return shapes my own art.”

Kahin’s earnest sincerity and genuineness translates to his on-stage persona too. He showers his audience with thanks and gratitude and sings the praises of all of his collaborators on CHUG before he plays his last song, even kissing bassist Collins on the forehead.

He ends his album release show with the final track on the album, “where did it all go wrong,” a booming, contemplative alt-rock tune that feels like a fitting conclusion. He has barely walked off the stage before the words “one more song” are reverberating around the room.

When he does come back out on stage at the roaring request of an encore, he doesn’t just play one more song — he plays three.

With no plan on stopping, Kahin details his year ahead in our interview, which includes playing every single show he gets asked to do, producing for other artists, and putting out even more music.

And from the looks of it, he’s not about to slow down anytime soon.