THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Canadian art-punks Crack Cloud return with their third album Red Mile, their most mature and vital work yet. 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.
A departure from the hermetic, multi-year gestation of their astounding 2020 album Pain Olympics, and their 2022 followup Tough Baby, Red Mile is the product of swift, group collaboration. Recorded predominantly in Joshua Tree and Calgary, the 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 are 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 as 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.
“The music of Red Mile came naturally, and of its own volition,” says Choy. “The Mojave had an elemental effect. The seemingly never-ending labyrinth of touring into exhaustion that characterized preceding years. And the externalization of Crack Cloud’s mythology, displaced and dismantled as we’ve grown out of ourselves, constantly, creatively reborn, by virtue and design.
“This is how I would describe Red Mile, and more generally, the group’s freefall, nearly a decade in the making. So when close friend and collaborator Aidan Pontarini pitched the skydiving punk concept for the album cover, it resonated deeply.”
