Canadian art punks Crack Cloud — composed of Zach Choy, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams, and Nathaniel Philipps — release their new single/video ‘The Medium’ off of their upcoming album, Red Mile, out July 26th via Jagjaguwar. Following the “part phlegmatic proto-punk, part synthy new wave” (Brooklyn Vegan) lead single ‘Blue Kite,’ ‘The Medium’ serves as Red Mile’s de facto thesis statement, and an ode to rock music’s form and its practitioners. The genre — typical, repeatable, corporatized as it can be — somehow still has the power to help us live through life. We see that the dusty sentiment of “I love rock and roll” can be exhumed, taken apart, and stitched back together.
The song’s video is a cinematic escapade, and perfectly captures the band’s aesthetic, simultaneously sincere and combative, youthful yet wise, meticulous yet carefree. It’s a group of people with everything at stake proclaiming their cathartic mission statement.
A departure from the hermetic, multi-year gestation of their astounding 2020 album Pain Olympics, and their 2022 follow-up work, Tough Baby, Red Mile is the product of swift, group collaboration. Having re-emerged as a lean, focused rock outfit, the group has produced their most mature and vital work yet. Recorded predominantly between the outskirts of Joshua Tree, California, and Calgary, Alberta, the resulting album is informed by a bittersweet melange of new beginnings and familiar places. The sprawling, novelistic structures of their previous albums are condensed, but the group is unwilling as ever to deal in superficiality. Through playful melodies and elliptical guitar soliloquy, they deliver a record of exceptional depth and distinctly unprecious warmth. The record’s “lived-in” feel is less a comfy armchair and more a picture frame carefully mended with electrical tape.
Much of the angst which lends their earlier work a caustic urgency has fallen away, replaced by a soulful but relentless introspection. The eight songs contemplate physical and psychic roadblocks, the experience of aging out of chaos, adjusting to strange new hopes, and making peace with the group’s own mythology. The songs are self-aware, meta statements — nods to the tropes of punk rock and of a life lived in music. Crack Cloud as artists are critical — and ultimately as forgiving — of themselves as they are the melting world around them. The songs balance an easy charm and cathartic power: affirming life without denying death. Crack Cloud’s Red Mile is a rock record — one made by people who know exactly how much that can mean.
Watch The Video For ‘Blue Kite’
Crack Cloud Online
