Crack Cloud

Jagjaguwar are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian art punks Crack Cloud. Today, the band announce their new album, Red Mile, out July 26th, and share its captivating lead single/video, “Blue Kite.” Additionally, the band have announced North American, UK, and European tour dates. After self-releasing their expansive and genreless first two EPs and two albums, the band — now composed of Zach Choy, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams, and Nathaniel Philips — have re-emerged as a lean, focused rock outfit, and are joined by creative director Aidan Pontarini. Red Mile is their most mature and vital work yet.

“Blue Kite” is upbeat, snotty, sprawling and ultimately anthemic; in moments even recalling the dawn of punk in the late 70s. In some moments, it sounds like Richard Hell, but in its gorgeous staccato string section, it might remind one of John Cale’s “Paris 1919.” The track plays on the tropes of a rock-n-roll lifestyle, investigating why rock is a vital art form and providing a “skeleton key” for understanding the album proper.

About the album, Zach Choy has written a statement of purpose, which you can read in full here.

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 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.