The story
Sasha Kristoff sings and plays keys in Awake & Dreaming, the alternative rock band from Waterloo, Ontario. She and guitarist Stefan Schneider met during the pandemic and started writing songs together, then played them outdoors when everything else was closed. There was no plan yet for what the band would become. The music came first.
She was raised in St. Thomas, Ontario. In high school she lived in the theatre, performing on stage and running tech behind it. She never did it professionally. She and Stefan are both huge theatre fans, and it shapes how the band builds its records and set lists: a beginning, a middle and an end, with ideas planted early that come back later.
Some of the oldest writing on the band’s records is hers. Yesterday or Tomorrow is a song she wrote alone before the band, about loving someone across time zones, released as a live solo piano recording. Antidote began as a lyric she wrote before the band existed. Old Ghosts, the band’s first single, is hers whole, written for the grandmother who taught her piano, with Stefan’s piano as the ghost calling back. I U Me started on a sticky note. Underwater came from one night she has described plainly.
I was just really sad one night. A heavy sadness I could not get out of.
Sasha Kristoff, on Underwater
Every song on the debut album, Inevitable, is an equal co-write with Stefan, and the two of them sequenced it together into one story, ten songs meant to be heard in order. Cold Shoulder began as her song about a relationship and became the album’s rebellion when Stefan wrote the chant. The record was mixed by Jay Dufour and mastered by João Carvalho, and came out October 16, 2026.
In the video for Something To Believe In, which the band directed itself in a Canadian winter, she walks through the snow in a red dress, finding notes of encouragement left by strangers. When she reaches the point where no note is waiting, she writes her own and leaves it for the next person.
You find these moments of encouragement along the way, left by people who fought the same fight before you. And when you reach a point where there’s nothing left to find, you have to create your own reason to keep going.
Sasha Kristoff, on Something To Believe In
Off stage she has volunteered since 2024 with the Railway City Music and Arts Festival in St. Thomas, a free four-day festival with three stages and more than 60 acts, helping with its marketing, website and advertising. By day she is a technical writer, and she runs her band with the same project discipline, with no label behind it.
Sasha takes the band’s name as a way of living: present in the moment while imagining what could be. For her it is also literal. She lives with Type 2 narcolepsy and carries the name partly to raise awareness.