Canadian art punks Crack Cloud release their new album, Red Mile, today via Jagjaguwar. Trailed by two captivating singles ‘Blue Kite‘ and ‘The Medium‘, Red Mile finds the band — now composed of Zach Choy, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams and Nathaniel Philips — re-emerging as a lean, focused rock outfit, here joined by creative director Aidan Pontarini.
Red Mile marks their most mature and vital work yet and Zach Choy has written a statement of purpose around it, which you can read in full here.
Praise for Crack Cloud – Red Mile
“Merging collective woes and universal emotions, ‘Red Mile’ is a tribute to humanity”
– So Young Magazine
“Canadian collective’s third LP channels sweet chaotic energy” – Uncut
Listen to Red Mile in full here: https://crack-cloud.lnk.to/red-mile
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. 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 lyrics are cutting but merciful. The songs are self-aware, meta statements — nods to the tropes of punk rock, of being an addict, 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.
For more info on Crack Cloud, head to: https://www.crackcloud.ca/
Crack Cloud – Red Mile // Jagjaguwar – Out Now
1. Crack Of Life
2. The Medium
3. Blue Kite
4. Lack Of Lack
5. Epitaph
6. I Am (I Was)
7. Ballad Of Billy
8. Lost On The Red Mile
Buy:
Buy Red Mile on CD, black vinyl, ‘freefall blue’ coloured vinyl and digitally here:
https://www.secretlystore.com/crack-cloud-red-mile
Buy the special Dinked edition of Red Mile on ‘burnout red’ coloured vinyl with a bonus CD featuring two previously unreleased tracks here:
https://dinkededition.co.uk/crack-cloud-red-mile
Follow Crack Cloud:
