Adam El Mouna and Erika Hagen had never met until just a few days ago. Yet, on June 18, they’ll share the stage at the Francos de Montréal for their very first at the renowned festival as part of a showcase presented by SOCAN. We had a chat with these two new and young free spirits of Québec’s music scene.
He makes sensitive pop with soul influences; she makes a raw kind of rock rooted in Americana. At first glance, their two worlds have little in common, but both are driven by the same ambition and the same high-intensity energy on stage. Adam El Mouna and Erika Hagen simply have no interest in standing still on or off stage; they want to give everything they have in every performance, at every moment.
From the first moments of their acquaintance at our Montréal office in an effort to break the ice ahead of their concert, the artists immediately engaged in an animated conversation and questions flew to and fro at a frantic pace: “Wait, what? What? What???” Adam El Mouna exclaimed, stunned as he discovered the musical journey of his future stage partner. “Wait, I don’t want to cut you off—keep going,” they keep telling each other in constant bursts of barely contained excitement. Behind their clearly distinct aesthetics mirror winding life paths shaped by a visceral need to invent themselves in order to fully come into their own.
For Adam, music first became a way of breaking free of isolation. As a racialized child in a very white school on Montréal’s South Shore, he felt the full force of the cultural: “I was trying to find something cool I could do to stand out and be accepted by others,” recalls the Québécois artist of Moroccan descent. He eventually found that, by making sounds with his mouth in the pure tradition of beatboxing, he could turn those long yellow-bus rides into something joyful, loud, and alive for his classmates.
His epiphany about being onstage in Grade 6. Impersonating Bruno Mars in year-end talent show, he felt an alter ego come to life when the crowd roared in approval. “They put sunglasses on me and […] everyone was convinced,” Adam recalls. “I was performing for the first time, and I loved it.” Later, encouraged by his mother, the teenager began taking singing lessons and had another revelation. “One day, I made my father cry by singing… I realized that what I loved was making people feel something,” explains the artist, who, after studying theatre, was introduced to Québec audiences on La Voix in 2023.
For Erika, musical training was discipline before opening into something freer and more instinctive. Classical violin, which she studied intensively dor a decade starting when she was six, eventually became “too rigid a framework” for her artistic impulses. By the end of her teens, she was exploring other ways to express herself: in theatre first, then in the physical thrill of enrolling in classes at the École de cirque de Québec. It took the hard stop of an injury for music to find its way back to her. “I was recovering from a concussion and stuck in my apartment. I was doing absolutely nothing… to the point where I was changing my nail polish colour every day! That’s when I started playing guitar,” says the Québec City artist, who would later cut her teeth as a street musician. “From that point on, I was super intensely into it and I once wrote three songs in 24 hours.”
It’s out of these complex detours that their formidable stage presence springs. You don’t simply watch Erika Hagen perform; you see her physically inhabit the space. “Let’s just say I’m very animated onstage,” she says flatly, proudly claiming a kind of “body awareness.” The ethics of circus training also left her with deep humility behind the scenes: she rejects any hierarchy among musicians.
Adam, for his part, also carries his theatre background with him when he steps onstage, but that’s not the whole story. Steeped in the monologues of comedian Rachid Badouri—also of Moroccan descent—he has mastered the art of working a crowd, having fun, for example, “translating young people’s slang” for an older audience when he performs at corporate events. “Oh my God does it ever work!” he says. “Whenever I do that, there’s an instant bump in ticket sales for my show.”
His secret strength, however, remains his empathy, drawn directly from his years as a camp counsellor, a time when he paid very close attention to the women he worked alongside: “Those women inspired me. There was a sensitivity and an effectiveness in the way they spoke, moved, and interacted.”
On June 20, Adam and Erika will have to condense all that into a flash showcase at the Francos de Montréal. It’s a tricky proposition that calls for a fierce sense of focus. Erika Hagen sees it as a chance to enjoy a shot of pure adrenaline: “You have to put the whole thing across directly […] we push the rock side of the show a little harder. We put the pedal to the metal go full throttle for 20 minutes.”
“When you get to these kinds of showcases, the work is already done,” continues Adam El Mouna, who won two awards last February at RIDEAU, Québec’s key event for presenters. “You just have to bring out the best of what you have. After that, if the phone is meant to ring, it’ll ring…”
According to Erika, the most recent winner of the Karim-Ouellet grant awarded to an emerging musician from Québec City, the real danger in playing a showcase in front of industry professionals is trying to please at all costs—even if it means losing sight of who you are. “You should never change the intention behind the show, or shift its inner compass. That would be the biggest mistake you could make.”
SOCAN Showcase at the Francos
June 18, 5 p.m. at Pub Brasseur de Montréal