Bryan Adams releases his seventeenth studio album, How’s It Goin’, on Friday, November 6, 2026 through his own BAD Records. It is a record about Canada, built from the country’s landscapes, history and characters, and previewed on October 28 by the single and video for Lake Ontario.
Adams has sold more than 100 million albums and singles across a career spanning almost five decades, and he has made arena records, film songs and duets in every direction available to a Canadian rock star. A full album turned toward home is a different kind of project. The announcement describes How’s It Goin’ as his musical love letter to Canada, and the confirmed song titles read like chapter headings from a Canadian history book taught by a guitarist: a ballad for a national hero, a battle from 1814, a ribbon of steel, dirt roads and diesel.
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The idea was simply to make a record about Canada.
That was Adams describing the album, and everything released so far follows the brief literally.
How’s It Goin’ Release Date And Formats
The How’s It Goin’ release date is November 6, 2026, on BAD Records. The physical album carries twelve songs and arrives on CD and vinyl, with the LP in a gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeves and an obi. The digital edition runs to thirteen songs, adding Lake Ontario as a bonus track at the end of the sequence. A special A4 hardback book edition packages the album on CD with the lyrics and images connected to the stories and subjects the songs explore, a format that suits a record built as much from research as from riffs.
The project grew out of documentary work. Adams was invited to write music connected to Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge, a film about the Maritimes, and the research pulled him further in: the stories he found there opened into a full album about the whole country. One of the confirmed tracks carries the documentary’s name, Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge, which makes the album’s origin part of its own tracklist.
The Confirmed Songs Tell Canadian Stories
The Ballad of Terry Fox honours the runner whose Marathon of Hope crossed the country in 1980 and never really ended in the Canadian imagination. The Battle of Lundy’s Lane reaches back to the War of 1812 and the 1814 battle fought near Niagara Falls. Diesel and Dirt and Iron Ribbon work the country’s labour and landscape, and the title track, How’s It Goin’, is described as an energetic, acoustic-driven celebration of Canadian life. The song 51st State, released earlier in 2026 on Canada Day, July 1, has already been drawing standing ovations on tour, according to the album announcement, and it joins the record as its most pointed piece of flag-waving.
Not every title on the twelve-song physical sequence has been published in the announcements so far, and the full list will be settled when the album lands on Friday. What is confirmed already gives the album its shape: this is a storyteller’s record, organized by place and memory rather than by singles.
Lake Ontario Arrives First
The preview single, Lake Ontario, was released on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, with an official video directed by Adams and Ben Ib that places him in a boat on the lake itself. The song begins by recounting the lake’s long story before arriving at its refrain: the lake will keep its name. It was written too late in the album’s production to make the physical pressings, which is why it closes the digital edition instead, a small scheduling accident that turned the record’s most topical song into its bonus track.
There is a birthday folded into release week as well. Adams was born in Kingston, Ontario, and he turns sixty-seven on November 5, the day before the album lands. A record about Canada, released on BAD Records in his sixty-seventh year, by a singer born in the province his preview single sings about, is the kind of alignment no marketing plan could improve.
For Canadian listeners, the sequence of the week is simple. The single and video are out now, the album arrives Friday in four formats, and a singer who has spent five decades exporting Canadian rock to the world has made the country itself the subject. How’s It Goin’ is not a nostalgia exercise. It is a working artist, at 66, spending a full album on the place that made him, and asking the rest of the world to listen to the stories.
