Crack Loud signs to Jagjaguwar

CRACK CLOUD SIGN TO JAGJAGUWAR + ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM, RED MILE, OUT JULY 26t
'BLUE KITE’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9SakhIBRn4
Live Sept 5th | Brussels, BE - Museum @ Botanique

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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 an extensive North American, UK and European tour dates, including the band's biggest headline show to date at London's KOKO on Sept 25th.

Although the band — now composed of Zach Choy, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams and Nathaniel Philips — has taken on many forms over the years, they now re-emerge as a lean, focused rock outfit, here 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.

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.

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Crack Cloud - Red Mile // Jagjaguwar - 26/07/24