THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Chastity is for the skids, the headbangers, the freaks. Chastity is for everyone who has suffered and survived the lethal combination of suburban overculture and mental distress. Chastity is especially for everyone who didn’t survive — who didn’t get out. Brandon Williams did, luckily, and his work with Chastity has been to collect people like him, who got out by the skin of their teeth.
Chastity’s first three albums — 2018’s Death Lust, 2019’s Home Made Satan, and 2022’s Suffer Summer — formed a trilogy that defined a four-year arc of the band’s contribution to outsider music. Each record was informed by Williams’ life, but each was also conceptual and interpretive, refracting his experiences through a level of remove. On Chastity’s new self-titled fourth record, there is no such distance: Williams decided to write a fully non-fiction work. Chastity is a 13-track record about the things that have always run through the band’s records — struggle, death, despair, redemption, darkness, and light — but this time, the songs ascend to new depths of intensity and desperation, new heights of resolution and power.
“It’s really about the first nosedive that I did as a young person,” says Williams. “It’s a record about struggle, about the missing years. It’s also a thank you to some people in my life.”
The record hurtles through melodic hardcore, shoegaze, and emo, all magnificently and enormously rendered by John Paul Peters (Propagandhi, Comeback Kid), who engineered and mixed the record at Peters’ Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg in March 2024. Chastity’s guitars have never sounded so immediate and towering, sometimes exploding into a sputtering, ripped-speaker chaos; and there are perhaps the most ferocious bass and drums sounds of the year on Chastity, splitting the difference between gnarly-as-fuck generator-show tones and vividly textured, hi-fi chest-beaters.
The new record arrives on the heels of a whirlwind six years for Chastity, founded by Williams in Whitby, Ont. From the start, it’s been a project of absolution via connection. There weren’t any venues for independent punk in the suburban town, so Williams and his friends started throwing shows in a barn on the outskirts. People took notice: Before long, Ontario stalwarts like Pup and Metz were making the pilgrimage to headline gigs, and profits from the shows went to a regional youth mental health services. Chastity spent the next years touring North America, including shows with Sunny Day Real Estate, Alexisonfire and Deafheaven, culminating in a 2024 headline run, with a set synced to an original film projected behind the stage.
This new era begins on Jaw Locked, with a tom strike and a wall of glorious, pounding major-key guitars. It drives forward, relentless and crackling with energy, while Williams revisits the feeling of voiceless loneliness with a full, determined belt. He wants to hear people scream it with him. “I think the idea of people singing along with me about a time in my life where I was feeling like my voice didn’t count for anything is a relief for me,” he says. “It’s like the circle has been closed in a way, it’s like finally the lonely can all be together.”
The followup Electrical Tower Dive finds Chastity’s first official use of “friggin’ ” tucked into a harrowing retelling of the first time Williams confronted, and re-considered, an early end to his life. Single Bleached and Buzzed follows with a classic skate-punk thrash that seizes with anticipation and anxiety, before spilling into the massive, instant singalong Summer All Over Again, where Williams laments an inability to fully enjoy even the most brilliant of warm, sunny days: “Summer all over again / And I am still stuck in my own head.”
The record closes with Drawing The Sun Back In The Corner Of The Paper, a patient, atmospheric, hopeful slow-burn about opening back up to life and living (as Williams describes it, extending the contract with life) thanks to the care and support of another. In Williams’ case, he credits his partner, the musician Linnea Siggelkow, whose care made him want to check in on others who need it, too.
It’s a beautiful and affirming ending to a Chastity record, centered on the band’s first and enduring idea: Life is less shitty if we live it together.”
