PUP unveil double A-Side “How To Live With Yourself” and “Smoke Screen”

Last year, PUP released their fourth album, THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND. It was swiftly followed by the release of the PUP Unravels Live In Front Of Everyone They Know EP. The four-track offering was recorded across multiple shows in the band’s hometown of Toronto.

Today they return with the double A-Side singles, “How To Live With Yourself” and “Smoke Screen”.

Of the single “How To Live With Yourself", vocalist Stefan Babcock says: “This was the first song we wrote when we started working on our last album. The first one is always the hardest, you tend to overthink everything, so we wanted to start with something simple and fun, something that we wouldn’t get too in our own heads about. This one feels like a classic PUP song to me, and while our goal for the record was to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and try new things, sometimes it feels good to write a catchy, miserable ripper that feels like it captures exactly what this band is about.”

"This song originated with a Nestor riff. He sent it around, and the thing was so slow that I thought he’d exported it wrong. But his idea was to do a song that was like the “sludgey” version of PUP, something we’d never really done before. The more I listened to it, the more it grew on me," Babcock says. "I remember in the height of the pandemic sitting in the backseat of my car at the Home Depot parking lot, anything to try and escape the house, and writing and recording all the lyrics on the spot.”