Gab Forest

Prévost, a guitar at ten, and a television start

Gab Forest — Gabriel Forest — comes from Prévost, in the Laurentians north of Montreal. He started on guitar at ten and worked through rock long before anything country entered the picture. At fourteen he turned up on Mixmania, the Quebec youth music series, and stayed on screen for three months. The show then put him on a run of 72 shows across the province, taking in the Festival des montgolfières and the Francofolies.

It is an unusual apprenticeship: a teenager playing festival stages before having written much of substance. The stagecraft that came out of it is still the most reliable thing about him, and he has said plainly that Mixmania is where he learned to write at all.

He was producing his own French-language songs through his adolescence. At seventeen he tried the other language, releasing five songs in English under the name Clyde Forest, and in 2019 shared a stage with Soran. Neither the English material nor the name survived the decade.

La Voix, a hip-hop detour, and the switch to French country

At twenty-two he went on La Voix and reached the quarter-finals on Garou's team. That was his second pass through Quebec's television talent formats and the one that appears to have settled what he actually wanted to make: he came out of it aiming at modern country rock rather than pop.

Getting there took two years and a handful of releases he no longer leans on. The digital singles started in 2022 — «7» in October 2022, «Black Car» with YungBlade and Was on 31 October 2022, «Drinking Problems» in April 2023 — hip-hop-inflected and largely in English. «On s'éclipse», in June 2023, was the turn: French, country, and the first of his records to behave like a single rather than an experiment.

He has been candid about how hard that took. In an interview published on 5 April 2025 he called finding his own identity “mon plus gros défi”, credited both Mixmania and La Voix with getting him there, and described his writing method without ceremony: “Des fois, j'ai simplement envie de parler de quelque chose, donc je m'assoie et go.” He treats a song as a single object rather than a lyric with music attached — the words have to be good, “mais la mélodie aussi. C'est un tout une chanson.”

Peut-être demain, and the record that got him on the radio

The debut album landed at the end of May 2024 on Productions Véronique Labbé: nine original French songs, co-produced by Doug St-Louis and Michel Francoeur, mixed by Luc Tellier. Forest named Morgan Wallen, Hardy and Luke Combs as his reference points and described the intended sound flatly — “On est allé chercher un bon mélange de sons country plus traditionnels, mais avec l'attitude du hip hop.” The rap years show up in the phrasing more than in the arrangements.

«Toujours mieux en solo» reached number 58 on Mediabase's Top 100 in Quebec. The song that did more for him was «5 minutes», written in roughly the time the title implies, taken from a true story and built around grief; Forest has said it drew more messages from listeners than anything else on the record. ÉNERGIE named him its iHeartRadio Future Star for December 2024.

The album's first year went on festival and support stages: Festival Grand R at Saint-Donat on 8 June 2024, the Festival Country de Lotbinière at St-Agapit on 22 August, and St-Tite on 6 September opening for Francis Degrandpré — the start of a working relationship that still shapes his calendar. Through the rest of 2024 he also opened for Laurence Saint-Martin.

Studio TD, 10 April 2025

The Studio TD show in Montreal on 10 April 2025 was the largest headline date of his career to that point and remains the clearest picture of the live act. He played the nine album songs with a full band across about ninety minutes, filling out the evening with medleys and covers — the arithmetic of a single nine-track record does not otherwise stretch to a headline night.

Doug St-Louis opened the show and came back during the main set for a song. Forest's father, also a guitarist, joined him for two. Coverage of the night described a well-filled room and a crowd that danced rather than sat, and framed the evening as a family affair rather than a showcase.

By then he had roughly thirty dates booked through to the end of May 2025, a summer of Quebec festivals lined up behind them, and a second album already in progress.

Appel manqué

The second album arrived on 15 May 2026, again nine tracks: «Appel manqué», «Au milieu de nulle part», «10 ans», «Harrison», «J'ai besoin d'prendre l'air», «L'eau dans mon fort», «Juste des chums», «Magané (All Your Life)» and «Perdre». Doug St-Louis produced, Luc Tellier mastered, and Laurence Saint-Martin — whose shows Forest had been opening two years earlier — handled musical direction. The label did not change.

The launch was held on 16 May 2026 at bar Dalton in Saint-Jérôme, a short drive from where he grew up, rather than in a Montreal venue. Erika Rolling and guitarist Zack Ouimet played the first set; St-Louis came up during Forest's to perform «Playa jreviens pas» with him. The title track went into rotation across Quebec country radio, 96.9 among them.

Where he stands, autumn 2026

Two dates are currently on sale and both are support slots on Francis Degrandpré's theatre tour, mounted behind Degrandpré's third album: Théâtre Beanfield in Montreal on 1 October 2026, doors at 7pm for an 8pm start, presented by LASSO Montréal, and Théâtre Le Capitole in Quebec City on 15 October. Both are bigger rooms than Forest headlines on his own name.

That is the shape of the thing at the moment. A four-month-old album with radio behind its title track, headline nights in bars and small halls around the Laurentians, festival slots through the summer, and the largest stages reached as somebody else's opener. Two albums in also means the covers and medleys that padded the Studio TD set are no longer strictly necessary — eighteen songs of his own is enough for a night without borrowing, which is the first practical difference the second record makes to the live show.