Artist Profile: Cam Kahin

Photo Credit: Oscar Tam

When Ontario-based songwriter Cam Kahin first started making guitar demos in his bedroom as a teenager, it was the angst and the raw energy of the music of his youth— the Warped Tour sounds of the mid-2000s— that truly appealed to him. And now, after a major label EP and a full album distributed across mainstream channels, Cam feels as though he’s rediscovered the sound and energy that first spurred him into creativity, and his experimentation and musical wanderings have returned to the sonic point he has called home since he first picked up the guitar.

Cam’s first exposure to music came when he was a small child, as he was enrolled in piano lessons before the age where his hands could even form chords on the instrument. While he enjoyed the act of learning piano, he immediately recognized his distaste for music theory, at least at that age— it made something he loved and enjoyed doing, at the time, feel like an academic exercise. 

But when his brother and his neighborhood friend, Aidan, started getting into punk and pop-punk music, Cam knew he had found something that appealed to him. He had recently formed a fascination with acts like Green Day and blink-182, and both his brother and Aidan’s interest in the genre thrusted him forward into his new discovery. The trio quickly decided to start a band, and because Cam was the youngest, he was forced to play the bass.

That band went through multiple iterations, none of which stuck. But it was the experience of collaboration, and of collective learning, that truly pushed Cam toward a musical pursuit. The trio would constantly be learning songs and sharing music together, and as Cam got older (and metalcore and post-hardcore entered his taste) his obsession only grew deeper.

“[Aidan] would come over and show us a riff or something he learned. And I would spend like the rest of the day trying to learn that…  [From the time] I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, I knew from around then I wanted to do something music-related, it just felt like the path I wanted to go on.”

But as Cam entered high school, a different wave took hold of his creative imagination. Growing up in a small town in Southern Ontario, there was little room to carve out an identity outside of what his peers were doing. So when his classmates’ tastes shifted to hip-hop, so did Cam’s. Cam spent hours recording his friends and other artists in his cities’ local scene, all the while gaining a deeper knowledge of production and engineering. He even, briefly, tried his hand at making music typical of the SoundCloud era.

But when COVID began, Kahin knew that such a path wasn’t genuine to either his artistic or his personal tastes. The isolation of the Pandemic provided room for Cam to undertake a period of reflection— he knew he wanted to pursue music, but how could he do it in a way that more closely matched the type of artist he wanted to be?

“I think [the Pandemic] just really made me spend the most amount of time with myself that I had since I was a kid.  I just really thought about, ‘What were the things that made me feel the most fulfilled?’ And that was playing guitar… I think a lot of that angst returned as well.”

As a result of these reflections, Cam returned to his guitar with a renewed sense of purpose to explore the music that had defined his childhood. His initial songwriting and lyricism came relatively easily to him, partially as a result of his pure adolescent confidence and partially as a result of the years of experience he already had with the genre. He quickly etched out a set of demos, sent them to a friend to be mixed, and recorded a series of visuals in his hometown.

These tracks got the attention of Dine Alone Records, a major Ontario indie label. He signed a deal with them to record his first two projects, which became 2023’s WHEN IT’S ALL OVER EP and 2026’s CHUG, Cam’s debut album.

But as Cam continued to develop his sound, he felt pressure from outside sources to conform to what was marketable in the modern music industry. He began playing live shows with a band, and as he molded his songwriting to fit that larger, more manageable sound, he felt himself drifting further and further away from his original sonic intentions. He had found rapid success as an artist and as a songwriter, and ‘Cam Kahin’, as a musical entity, was gaining local recognition. But he sensed his experimentations and willingness to bend genres, which he had displayed in full force on his early singles, slowly being flattened by the pressures of the music industry.

CHUG represents his favorite songs from that period, and it’s a project he’s really proud of. But it also, in many ways, represents a sonic shift for Kahin.

“I think I had a lot of external pressures and also was still so young. I felt a little wide-eyed to the industry and having a manager. I just kind of didn’t know how to navigate it… I love [CHUG]. I think it's really cool. But I also almost can't listen to it, because I think I've grown a lot as a person and just have gotten rid of a lot of the people that I think were negatively affecting me in the project. And a lot of change has happened.”

CHUG itself carries much of the energy that is characteristic of Cam’s music, even if it’s in a more polished form. From the rutted riffs of tracks like “come around” to the more saccharine strummings of tracks like “tied up”, the project displays an impressive dynamic range and lyrical refinement that weren’t necessarily present on his earlier work.

Even a brief preview into his recent influences is enough to get a taste for the experimentations he’s undertaking.

“[The new music] is very ‘in-the-box’ sounding. I've been way more collaborative the past year, mainly with these two guys that I've become super close with— Nico Tripodi and Adam Fritz. They both work on some pretty ‘out there’ music… I've been listening to the new Feeble Little Horse album, the new Ice Age album, just what I think is exciting and actually pushing the needle, especially within Canadian music.”

As Cam enters this new era, therefore, his fans can certainly expect his sound to be different from what they’ve grown used to. But the raw energy— the sheer emotional depth and complexity of sound that have made his tracks worth engaging with— will only continue to deepen, harkening back not only to the sounds of his youth but the boundary-pushing acts that continue to inspire him today.