AHI

A decision made at a truck stop

AHI — Ahkinoah Habah Izarh, the stage name his initials spell and which is pronounced "eye" — grew up in a West Indian family in Brampton, Ontario, the sprawl north-west of Toronto. He left college without finishing and spent years travelling on a backpacker's budget, a run that took in Ethiopia, Trinidad and, less glamorously, Thunder Bay. Music was around him at home, but it was not presented as a career.

The turn came in a now-closed truck stop in a small town outside Thunder Bay, where a chance conversation with a stranger named John ended with AHI accepting that he was going to do music for the rest of his life and heading back to Brampton to start. He relocated to Toronto, began performing and recording under the three-letter name, and released the independent debut We Made It Through the Wreckage in 2016.

That record did what a self-released debut occasionally does: it found a playlist. It landed on Spotify's Top 50 folk list the same year, which gave a man with no label and no agent an audience outside Ontario.

The years that built an audience

2017 was the year the industry caught up. AHI won the folk category of the Canadian Songwriting Competition and took the Stingray Rising Star Award at the Folk Music Ontario conference for "Ol' Sweet Day"; Folk Music Ontario named him Recording Artist of the Year the following year. He signed to the Nashville-based independent Thirty Tigers and released his second album, In Our Time, in 2018, with Paradigm handling bookings and his wife, Ashaten, co-managing him.

The run of exposure that followed was unusually broad for a Canadian roots artist at that stage. He recorded an NPR Tiny Desk concert in early 2018 and performed "Made It Home" on CBS This Morning. In Our Time was nominated for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year at the 2019 Junos. On stage he moved up quickly, opening for Mavis Staples at Massey Hall in Toronto and joining Lauren Daigle and Scott Mulvahill on a national American theatre tour in early 2019.

Prospect arrived in 2021, with the odds-and-ends collection Unarchived the same year and a deluxe edition in 2022. It brought a second Juno nomination in the same category in 2022 and a place on that year's Polaris Music Prize longlist. By then the shape of the career was clear: steady, self-directed, built on touring rather than on a hit.

Rahki, and a folk record made by a Black crew

The Light Behind the Sun, released on 7 February 2025 through AHI's own 22nd Sentry imprint, is the record that reframed him. He handed production to Rahki, whose previous credits run through Kendrick Lamar and Aloe Blacc, and assembled an entirely Black creative team — a thing he has pointed out is close to unheard of in folk. His reasoning was blunt: to make folk music the whole world can sing to, he first had to find his people. Of working with Rahki he said they walked in as strangers and walked out as brothers.

The result is eleven songs in about thirty-five minutes, built on his own grain-heavy voice and acoustic guitar but arranged with soul and hip-hop instincts and Afro-Caribbean colour, deliberately brighter and more outward-looking than Prospect. The album was supported through 2025 by the Call on Me EP, an acoustic version of "Human Kind" on 25 April and a reading of "No Woman, No Cry" on 19 June.

Writing about the record, he framed touring as the point rather than the aftermath: the songs, in his phrasing, only truly come to life on the road.

Standing in 2026: two awards and a stream of singles

At the 21st Canadian Folk Music Awards, held in Calgary over the weekend of 13 April 2026, AHI was among the night's leading winners with two of the 22 prizes handed out across 21 categories — Contemporary Album for The Light Behind the Sun and Single of the Year for "Human Kind", which he cut with Tenille Townes. PIQSIQ and Matthew Byrne also took two awards each.

Rather than follow the album with another album, he has spent 2026 releasing in instalments: "Köln (Lost in Time)" at the start of January, "House of Mirrors" on 27 March, "Chosen" with Wyclef Jean on 22 May, and "Worlds Untold" on 21 August, all through 22nd Sentry. He has described "House of Mirrors", written in Nashville, as marking a new chapter, the point at which he began producing and engineering his own material instead of handing that work to someone else.

It is a notably unhurried way to follow an award-winning record, and it keeps the catalogue moving without committing him to another full studio cycle while he is out playing.

On stage this autumn

Two 2026 bookings show the range of what he does live. On 9 April he and Aysanabee played artsPlace in Canmore, Alberta, with the backing bands and production stripped out entirely — newer songs mixed with material from across both careers, and the stories told between them carrying the night. AHI's summary of why he does it was straightforward: the ability to get on stage, share the songs and tell the stories is what he lives for.

The autumn is a different job. He is out across Canada as special guest to Allison Russell on the tour behind her latest album, opening in Toronto on 22 October, then Théâtre Beanfield in Montreal on 23 October and Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on 25 October, before the western leg — the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg on 3 November, the Winspear Centre in Edmonton on 5 November, Grey Eagle Event Centre in Calgary on 6 November and the Chan Centre in Vancouver on 9 November. These are seated concert halls, not clubs, which suits a performer whose strongest tool is a voice and a story told between songs.