Edwin Raphael opens I Know a Garden with a sound that stutters and hesitates before anything else arrives. First Time on Earth moves with the kind of momentum that sounds like arrival rather than departure, the vocal floating just above the pulse, wide-eyed and slightly unsteady. “I’ve never been here before / but it feels like home.” The uptempo beat keeps pushing while the lyric sits with the contradiction.
Raphael is Dubai-raised and Montreal-based, born to Indian parents from Kerala, and this third album was recorded across all three of those worlds. Co-produced with Connor Seidel (Half Moon Run, Charlotte Cardin, Matt Holubowski), it’s indie folk with enough orchestral weight to fill a room. These are songs built for distance and open windows.
Moonstruck slows things down and those strings become the whole weather of the track. Raphael’s vocal sits crystal clear above them, confident enough to let the arrangement breathe. The lyric deals with racial identity, the experience of having a self that others read before you’ve spoken: “did I hit the wrong colour / is this how good it gets / but I wanna be a hero.” Three lines, no thesis.
Hymn for a Dragonfly is mid-tempo and openly optimistic, foot-tapping in a way that earns it. The song has roots in something specific: summers in Kerala, a memory of his mother catching a dragonfly on a piece of string and leading it to pick up pebbles from his and his sister’s palms. Raphael wasn’t sure it had actually happened until a home video confirmed it. The wonder in the song doesn’t feel performed because it isn’t.
Mosaic in the Sun pulls back, dreamy vocal over subtle instrumentation. Then There’s You moves in the direction of Ben Howard’s best writing. Finger-picked and spare, it opens on “books stacked on the night stand / short glance as I hit the floor,” building a portrait of romantic ambivalence where the images carry the weight the lyrics don’t spell out. The chorus, about someone who performs closeness without committing to it, lands lighter in delivery than it does on repeated listens.
It’s a Shame You Swim So Well is the mid-album standout. Something in the production opens up underneath it, a low-level unease that suits the lyric’s central image: watching someone move through danger with such ease that they don’t register the risk. Emerald to Gold is where the full band earns its place, textures layering without pulling the song sideways. Then a two-minute instrumental, It’ll All Pass Anyway, strips everything back to gentle percussion and a slow-building melancholy that earns a full song. It doesn’t get one.
Ballroom of My Memory picks the pace back up before the album closes with A Sunbeam Lent to Us Briefly, featuring UK artist Jordan Mackampa. Acoustic, unhurried, both vocals moving around each other with enough care that neither overtakes the other. “Nothing is permanent / except the sun and moon.”
Edwin Raphael brings these songs to L’Escogriffe in Montreal on April 2nd, and that feels like the right room for it.
I Know a Garden will be released on March 20, 2026 via Favourite Library
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