There’s a new chapter opening in the ZOON universe, and it hits different. ZOON — the musical project of songwriter, composer, activist, and artist Daniel Monkman — has announced their highly anticipated third album, ‘Happy Thought School’, dropping June 19, 2026 via Paper Bag Records. Pre-order/pre-save is live now.
To kick things off, ZOON is sharing the album’s first single: the hazy, emotional gut-punch that is One Too Many Nights (feat. Sam Jr. of Broken Social Scene). It’s an ethereal, immersive anthem about finding yourself again after a relationship unravels — that disorienting, quiet recalibration when the person is gone but their imprint on your daily life lingers everywhere.
“When a relationship ends, it’s not just the person you lose — it’s the version of yourself that existed beside them. One Too Many Nights is about that recalibration. I don’t date often, so when something shifts, it shifts my whole orbit. In that moment, being alone felt like the honest path forward.” — Daniel Monkman
More Than Heartbreak — An Album About Identity Under Pressure
While One Too Many Nights and album track OMNI II wade deep into the emotional wreckage of love lost, ‘Happy Thought School’ is a bigger, more complex beast. The album interrogates identity formation against a backdrop of unsettling hostility — and the title itself tells the whole story.
The title track layers intergenerational recordings of Daniel’s mother and aunt, who attended the same school in East Selkirk, Manitoba decades earlier and weren’t even allowed off the bus. For Daniel, that school carried a different kind of weight — enduring racism as one of the only Native students there, escaping into early-2000s Top 20 pop blasting through headphones while standing alone in a field. Joyful surface. Painful sublayer. That contradiction is the album’s entire architecture.
Across its ten tracks, ‘Happy Thought School’ refracts heartbreak, relapse, racial trauma, and spiritual recalibration through what Monkman has long called “moccasin-gaze” — a cosmic, tape-hiss-soaked pop shaped by memory and Anishinaabe storytelling. It’s ZOON’s most emotionally forensic and compositionally expansive statement yet.
Track List
- Beautiful II
- One Too Many Nights (feat. Sam Jr.)
- Atactic
- I Was Younger
- Happy Thought School
- OMNI II
- Olivia’s Tears
- You Can’t See Me This Low
- How Many More Times
- Used and Stapled (One Last Dance)
The ZOON Story So Far
If you’re just catching up — here’s your crash course. ZOON first emerged with ‘Bleached Wavves’ (2020), introducing the self-described “moccasin-gaze” sound that braided shoegaze textures with Anishinaabe storytelling. The debut spent 7 weeks at #1 on the Earshot Chart and hit #1 on the NACC Top 30, pulling critical love from The New York Times, Pitchfork, CBC Q, The Fader, KEXP, Exclaim!, Paste, and basically everyone worth listening to. It landed a Polaris Music Prize shortlist nomination.
The follow-up, ‘Bekka Ma’iingan’ (2023), foregrounded Anishinaabe language and cultural memory even more deeply — earning another round of year-end best-of placements, another #1 on Earshot, another #1 at NACC, and continued Polaris long list attention. ZOON also picked up a Polaris shortlist nod for their collaborative project OMBIIGIZI (with Adam Sturgeon of Status/NonStatus), which scored a 2023 JUNO Award nomination to boot.
Three albums deep, the arc is undeniable. ‘Happy Thought School’ is next. June 19. Mark it.
Pre-order/pre-save ‘Happy Thought School‘ now via Paper Bag Records.
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