PUP released their last full-length, THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND, last year. A brilliantly meta and belligerent piece of scrappy punk loveliness, it was a huge moment for the Toronto quartet. Rewarding them with some of their biggest-ever shows and plenty of critical acclaim along the way, they have now shared a couple of songs from the sessions that didn’t make it the first time around.
But they deserve the same amount of love and adoration because they are brilliant. They are “How To Live With Yourself”, an existential musing placed on top of a scuzzy instrumental. That classic PUP nihilism shines through like the sun peaking from behind the clouds, and there are plenty of dancefloor-filling beats to help combat the anxiety.
Vocalist/Guitarist Stefan Babcock had this to say about it:
“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.”
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And then there is “Smoke Screen”, which sits on the more melodically thrilling sound of the band’s sound. Slowing things down to a glacial pace and rocking you back and forth inside your own head, it’s an arms-aloft anthem of the highest order.
Stefan had this to add:
“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. 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.”
