Podcasts about Montreal, Quebec

The Canadiens had already won in a shootout when Nick Suzuki called his own line "pretty brutal all night" and said "we were soft as a group". A Locked On Canadiens clip turns on that verdict, and it is a fair picture of Montreal listening on PlayNext: most of what plays is people picking apart the Habs, wins included. Goaltending, blue-line lapses, deadline salary and a playoff series against Tampa Bay keep coming round. Beside the hockey sits a smaller band of city talk: Quebec politics and housing fights on The Big Five Podcast, and a reunited radio pair on Standing By. There is also one outlier, a werewolf campaign named for the city.

What Montreal is

Montreal is Quebec's largest city and Canada's second-largest, built on an island in the St. Lawrence River. It is majority French-speaking with a large English-speaking community, which keeps language a political subject as well as an everyday one. It is known for its festivals, its food, the Old Port and Mount Royal, and for the Canadiens, the most decorated franchise in the NHL.

One goalie, three shows

Jakub Dobes comes up across the hockey shows, and hearing him discussed side by side is the quickest way to tell them apart. On Locked On Canadiens he is the netminder who played his way into the goalie battle by being the best the team has, and one host admits to wanting far more time on him than the show can spare. Habs Unfiltered comes at it through numbers and fallout: Dobes' run of starts heading into the playoffs, and another goaltender gone from "our guy" to the third goalie. Canadiens Connection files it as history, with Dobes passing Carey Price and Patrick Roy for the club's rookie wins record during a seven-game streak.

Two temperaments

Locked On Canadiens and Habs Unfiltered are both two-voice shows, and they differ in temper more than subject. Locked On is brisk and warm. The hosts tag-team one shared argument and swing from a stat citation to plain fan feeling within a sentence. Its clips run from Suzuki's self-criticism to whether Slafkovsky may need to move back with Demidov if Montreal falls behind Tampa Bay. In one stretch, talk about depth forwards, Owen Beck among them, lands on a practical point: a team that already has luxury fourth-liners does not send second-round picks out the door for them at the deadline.

Habs Unfiltered is quicker and rougher-edged. A claim goes down, the other voice pushes back or extends it, and the language stays blunt. After a loss to Anaheim, one host concedes that a defenceman erred by following Guhle into the same corner, then turns the question round: "where the hell is the forward who's supposed to cover?" In the same episode the hosts tie that loss to a defence that keeps "giving away the blue line".

Trades, milestones and the game log

Canadiens Connection treats the club as an organization rather than a nightly scoreline, with regular attention to Laval and young-player development. One clip takes the trade deadline apart: whether Kent Hughes will need to move Laine's salary, what it means that Laine's agent, Andy Scott, has had permission to talk directly to other teams, and why it does not speak well that no trade has come together in that time. Another marks Cole Caufield's 50th goal, which made him the seventh Canadiens player to reach that mark in a season.

Eyes On The Prize stays closer to the schedule, with a string of Bottom Six Minutes entries named for each matchup and Habsent Minded episodes alongside on prospects, as in "Grading Vinzenz Rohrer's season with the Zürich Lions - a Habsent Minded podcast". Its clips take in Sweden's World Juniors win and a prospect discussion with Hadi Kalakesh. Another is an appreciation of Alexandre Texier after his hat trick: a player his old team did not want, now playing well "in a city that speaks his native language", with the fans behind him.

The city between games

The Big Five Podcast, hosted by Elias Makos and filed under News & Politics, is where Montreal and Quebec affairs get argued out. Its titles keep returning to provincial politics: the PQ, the CAQ leadership, Bill 96, Mark Carney's majority. The clips sit closer to street level. Dan Delmar argues that blocking an 18-storey tower in the Old Port makes Montreal's housing shortage worse. The conversation then sets Hong Kong's building speed against the layers a Montreal developer must clear, from local permission to knock down a house one speaker calls a total dump to a further round at the central city. Justine McIntyre says Quebec should fix its roads before asking drivers to pay tolls, and a Quebec lab's finding of at least 50 percent cane sugar in cans labelled as maple syrup gets its turn.

Standing By: The Terry and Ted Podcast is the unhurried counterweight. Its own description calls Terry DiMonte and Ted Bird a Montreal morning radio staple, reunited. The show sounds like two familiar voices already mid-conversation, in plain, lived-in language about buses, pizza joints, old venues, construction, concerts, hockey and radio memories. Titles such as "The uncomfortable truth: Greeks make the best Montreal pizza" and "Montréal through the DiMonte lens, unfiltered" mark the ground. The clips reach further. In "Saving Liam", talk of Formula 1 and the big, flashy markets vying for a race, Asian cities with new money among them, includes a concession that beside Monaco, Monaco is the "fancy pants city". The same episode carries the words every parent dreads: "Enjoy your last few days with him." A Remembrance episode carries a wartime chaplain's line: "It is sheer tragedy to be losing these lads."

Montreal as a setting

RPGClinic Campaigns, filed under Actual Play, uses the city another way: its Werewolf: The Apocalypse campaign is titled Montreal by Moonlight. The clips are story beats. Troian shatters Ryan's pelvis in a motorcycle joust to prove her strength in a Garou challenge. Zach frenzies and slams his fists into a chained oak tree. Dante explains that he writes everything down, fearing memories will be lost like in Montreal. The stretch from "Camp Rock" is quieter table work: an I love New York postcard whose back says only see you soon gets checked for its postmark, its post office box and its date against a similar card Troian received.

Where to start

• For hockey argument at its bluntest, Habs Unfiltered. For the same season talked through with more warmth, Locked On Canadiens.
• For the club as a whole, from deadline salary to milestones, Canadiens Connection.
• For city and provincial news, The Big Five Podcast, with the Old Port housing clip as a way in.
• For something slower and more personal, Standing By: The Terry and Ted Podcast.

The Montreal feed on this page plays clips from these shows.