Punk in perpetual freefall

Crack Cloud themselves are proof of survival in an inhospitable world. The earliest iteration of the group was conceived nine years ago as a proxy-rehab outlet operating along the fringes of Calgary, Alberta. Theirs was a precarious vision in which they had a fierce belief: that creativity and collectivism could be a lifeline for recovery. When Crack Cloud relocated to Vancouver amidst a national spike in the opioid crisis, the group became a mutant orchestra contained not only to musicians, but creatives of all disciplines. With several members on the frontlines working out of low-barrier shelters in the Downtown Eastside, and some being recovering addicts themselves, their output became inextricable from an ideal of harm reduction.

Pain Olympics, Crack Cloud’s debut album, cauterised the wounds. Their sound is a many-headed beast: frenetic post-punk, electronic hardcore, funk and downright pop emerge in white-hot bursts, at once baroque and industrial. At the epicentre of it all is drummer, vocalist, chief lyricist and founding member, Zach Choy. He has ‘Laughing At The System’ tattooed on his lower abdomen and plays left-handed on a drum kit set up for a right-handed person, which he sits at with almost militant posture.

A Crack Cloud performance rides the knife’s edge between chaos and discipline. Zach’s eyes close, lost in a rhythmic hypnosis; his brother Will plays his guitar with a cool and exacting precision, while keyboardist Aleem Khan plays frenetically as if conjuring hexes. Cellos, harps, saxophones and flutes are all drawn into the storm’s eye. It’s a volatile, ever-changing thing.

The band might have been born from trauma, but their intention is to foreground their humanity. There’s a cruel paradox that suffering outwardly can make you invisible, and that’s why Crack Cloud announce themselves loudly and force you to look. Their broken edges leave a mark, and yet the impression is one of levity. There is, and has always been, an incredible sense of joy, compassion and camaraderie at the heart of it all – just as joshua trees thrive in the desert.

Unmoored from home and any sense of consistency, the Covid-induced lockdown forced Crack Cloud to hit the emergency brakes. Tough Baby, their second album, was a fractured experience mired by social distancing but also internal polarisation. Obsessions could be indulged at length in what felt like infinite time, and it soon became an increasingly personal body of work. Bryce Cloghesy, the band’s saxophonist and guitarist who releases his own work under the alias Military Genius, explains: “I think with Pain Olympics, we had this idealism around this sense of community, and with Tough Baby, that community started to become fragmented and slowly split. We had to come to terms with the fact that things don’t always evolve how you would hope or expect.”

This evolution, then, led them to the desert – another context of extremes – but also to a place more intensely familiar: the Red Mile, a stretch that runs through Calgary, Alberta. Crack Cloud, for the first time in almost a decade, have come home. And it’s this notion of home not as a place but as an inescapable condition which has made itself their third album’s namesake.

Red Mile, their first release for Jagjaguwar, is the antithesis to Tough Baby. “We wanted to strip things of gratuity,” says Zach Choy. “There was a maximalism which became a trend within Pain Olympics, but was slowly exploited on Tough Baby. There was almost this urgency to feel grounded again as musicians. The pace [of touring] didn’t feel sustainable for us anymore, and I think that bled into everything creatively.”

It’s something Cloghesy describes as a “changing of the seasons” for the band, which only a three-week stint recording Red Mile in a landscape of total absence could help them express. “Change is inevitable, and this has been a big reset for us,” he says. “There’s been a lot of questioning in this period of our lives and as a group, a lot to process. The desert is a great place to do that, it has a great influence on your psyche, being in this endless expanse. There’s a minimalism and certain rawness [to Red Mile] which the desert drew out of us. It was necessary to find and embrace space in the music, but in our personal lives, too. We needed to get back to the humanity of being a live group, together in a room. I think that’s forever relevant in music – the humanity, right? Language can sometimes get in the way of a feeling, but we all definitely felt this as we were making it.”

But the prospect of a new record? They didn’t know what to say. Crack Cloud have always had to exist within the tension between art and industry, finding ways to dismantle institutions from within while still having to negotiate with them for the group’s survival. The words, back then, came easily. Their youthful angst had been ignited by the need to rail against the bad cards they, and society itself, had been dealt. But with Red Mile, their outward ferocity has been replaced with an intense introspection. Lyrically, Choy wrestles with the band’s past, their struggles with relinquishing control of their narrative, and questions of their legacy. On “Epitaph”, it’s likened to pulling hair out of cement: “Why can’t I say what’s on my mind? / Why are the words so hard to find? / I have no mouth and I must scream / Tower of babel in my dreams”.

It's an image that captures both existential dread and a strange kind of life-affirming empowerment. Crack Cloud are no different. “I think there’s also a resistance, or an exhaustion maybe, with media in general,” says Choy. “There was something really succinct about being able to capture this through a single image rather than a barrage of narratives. It’s not something Crack Cloud has ordinarily done. In the past, there’s method to our madness with these long, complicated and layered processes of writing and capturing these larger ideas, but there was something really freeing about putting all of our eggs in one basket with the skydiver. There’s maybe even a connection with us deciding to work for a label for the first time and putting a lot of our resources into this one image. There’s an expectation with an artist interfacing with social media to capture attention and take up space. It feels kind of tongue-in-cheek in a way, like, ‘Is this not enough? What more do the people want? What more do we need to say?’”

The image is equal parts bombastic and surrounded by total quietude, a dichotomy captured in the record itself. There is the orchestral grandiosity of “Blue Kite” and the amped-up rock and roll of “The Medium”, but also moments of minimalism and restraint as with “Lost On The Red Mile” and “Lack Of Lack” (at least at the beginning, anyway). It gives space for questions like, ‘Who are we now, and who have we been?’ to breathe.

When I mention that Crack Cloud's existence has spanned almost a decade, Choy stares off into the distance and begins to reflect. “I can’t believe it has been ten years… It’s jarring, a slow burn of realisation, growing into age,” he says. “I think what’s maybe extraordinary about this project is where it comes from. It comes from trauma; it comes from a complicated place of self-discovery and humble beginnings. We didn’t expect it to go anywhere, or to last as long as it has. There just seems to be this innate drive that keeps it going.”

“I don’t know how I would describe the phenomena of Crack Cloud and the longevity it’s had. Time went by, and this idealism we were born out of just wasn’t sustainable. It started out as a mechanism of recovery and trying to be a more complete person, to be more lucid and understand myself through creativity more – and at this point, it almost feels like the inverse. The more engaged I am with the art, it’s like I’m re-entering a kind of trauma zone. It became this habit that was facilitated for a while, especially with Pain Olympics and into Tough Baby, where it wasn’t so much relinquishing trauma as it was reliving it. How do you maintain that?”

Since the reception of Pain Olympics which elevated Crack Cloud’s profile to the global arena, the band have struggled with their origin story as recovering addicts being appropriated by the music press for an alluring headline. Their desire – and their sense of obligation – to be transparent about their experiences with substance abuse led to the residual feeling of being both calcified and taken advantage of. It all costs you. It’s something Choy can’t help but exorcise on Red Mile; an unsettled frustration that can’t help but resurface. On “Blue Kite”, he spits: “You know my story yeah I’m just a fucking addict / The market’s run its course, now back into the attic.”

“It’s been something that we’ve had to learn how to navigate somewhat in stride,” he shares. “There was this naivety going out into the world with our story and our optimism, trying to broadcast it in an uncontrolled, uninformed way. We didn’t really understand the mechanisms of press and the implications of that kind of engagement. I’m not regretful as much as it created an element of caution for us moving forward. When you’re young, you don’t think about the long term. And in a more radical sense, I didn’t think about the long term because I didn’t think about living long-term – an early tendency as an addict and someone who was quite unstable for many years. I think that translated to how I handled the media and the project itself: this fiery, urgent message of just wanting to communicate to find solidarity, I guess. It’s not sustainable, and that’s not a bad thing. I think there’s beauty in how ephemeral passion and those messages can be. They’re not meant to be commodified or branded – I don’t want to be commercialising the idea of a DIY harm reduction collective. That’s not a legacy I intend on perpetuating; I don’t think any of us wanted or intended that. We just love doing what we do, and we’ve grown a lot. There’s still a lot of vitality, still a lot of commitment to the arts and wanting to explore this narrative and what it all means. The story isn’t over, I just don’t think there’s this urgency anymore to speak on things that we are no longer fully immersed in. But it felt right to be transparent, it felt right to be real. I encourage that in everyone, and I still do.”

The turning point Red Mile represents is something Choy likens to an “identity crisis” for the band. “It really is an interesting topic, and I would love to know about other musicians’ experiences,” he continues. “I feel like you really do see these curvatures when you look at artists who have been making art for decades. You see the beautiful naivety of the early days, just these wavelengths that change over time, and that’s something that I personally really love about the idea of being able to continue making art through my life. I’m not bound to a single feeling because it’s all fleeting. I have a lot of gratitude for the audience that has grown with us and received these different ebbs and flows and fluctuations and changes that Crack Cloud has been through - because there’s nothing appealing to me about remaining the same. Being static is unfulfilling. This preordained role of being eternally committed to playing ‘Swish Swash’ or ‘Drab Measure’ every night is a terrible, terrible feeling for me. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about the journey.”

Khan contributes a thought which lingers. It speaks not to Crack Cloud, but culture as a whole: “Maturity is priceless, and maturity is really squandered away … We’re a punk band. We’re supposed to be anarchists. We’re supposed to be rude. We’re supposed to have no morals, no ethics, nothing. But as you get older and you throw all that bullshit out the window, you really start to see that life is the real gift.”

There's a James Baldwin line from Giovanni’s Room which feels resonant with the thesis behind Red Mile: “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.” It’s a strange feeling, returning to a place where nothing has changed and yet it – or maybe you – are irrevocably different. You can never be exactly as you were again. “There’s this cyclical relationship with home and how you define it,” reflects Choy. “You leave home and you come back and there’s a mix of nostalgia but also shame, maybe, having to return to the old watering hole. For me, there was a pragmatism to it – priorities shifted. But that aside, there was definitely an existential, sort of poetic thing about returning that I really leaned into and personally contributed to my output with this record. Artists can really seize these feelings and romanticise them in a way that can sometimes even be distracting or detrimental to the cultivation of a normal, healthy life. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but I think it’s a really interesting way to live.”

Choy’s and his wife are tucked away in the suburbs. “I haven’t lived in a suburb for half my lifetime,” he says almost incredulously. “It’s a really psychedelic, weird, uncanny thing. It doesn’t need to be, it can just be what it is, but for me I think it’s about finding the extraordinary in the mundane.” There is a stark difference between Vancouver, where Crack Cloud’s genesis really began, and Choy’s hometown of Calgary, Alberta. It’s an oil town with a Western spirit; as we speak, they’re in the middle of their ten-day annual rodeo, The Stampede (“everyone wears a cowboy hat and gets drunk in the parking lot”).

“It’s a confounding culture,” he says. “But despite that, and despite me not having any real political or emotional allegiance to the landscape, there’s just something unexplainable about this connection I have with it that feels really special.” Khan articulates the process of finding a new context to live through, respecting and appreciating just how much you’ve changed when you return to your hometown. “You leave because you’re in pain; you come back because you want to feel better,” is a paradox he outlines. “You find the pain is still there - but you understand it more and you can sit with it. I think when it comes to family, honouring your roots and understanding who you are, that’s priceless. I’ve spent time with people who don’t have a place to live in the past, and you sit with them and they say, ‘Hey, I don’t have a house, but I got a home’ – and they point to their chest.’ Wherever the fuck you want, that’s home.”

Lyrically, there is much to do with the concept of saṃsāra, the wandering and cyclicity of life. It feels almost as if Crack Cloud have completed a loop in time. “It’s like returning home is starting again,” observes Cloghesy. “And so it’s an apt time for the band to start again as well, to take stock and reimagine what our path forward might be. I don’t think our intention is to stick our pole in the sand and say, ‘This is our home and this is who we are now’ – more so, ‘This is the moment we captured, and now we’re moving forward’. None of us knows where this is gonna lead, and that’s the freefall, right? You’re just perpetually falling and you don’t know where you’re gonna land.”

With audacious beginnings and an undetermined end, Crack Cloud are finding the relief in being airborne, caught in suspense. “I feel like this is Crack Cloud’s most spiritual album,” Cloghesy remarks. “I think that’s a shift in our culture, too, this movement towards looking inwards. Maybe it’s age, but I think it’s also a sign of the times. It’s a new mode for us, getting at something a little bit more metaphysical, interior and eternal.”

A realisation Choy is constantly trying to reinforce across the joy and turbulence of the last decade is that it’s all about the process. He shares, “Any kind of online legacy, or however you would describe Crack Cloud in another ten or twenty years, is so trivial compared to the moments that we share together actually creating these things. I feel it more than ever, as time goes by, the transience of how many people’s hands have been involved with this project; how many people have come and gone, the friendships that have ended and begun. The landscape is always changing in life and in the microcosm of Crack Cloud as a platform.”

There has always been something eruptive and unpredictable at the band’s core. “Are we going to do another record? Are we going to play another show, travel overseas again? It never feels guaranteed,” he says. “The one sense of urgency that has maintained consistent throughout this project is there’s never really a guaranteed tomorrow.”

It’s a sentiment simply captured by Khan: “I’m just happy to be here. I’m happy to be alive, I’m happy to know these people and I’m thankful for the future relationships that we will build and all the previous relationships we’ve had. Here we are. The medium itself is the message that goes on forever. Keep fighting the good fight.”