Crack Cloud – Red Mile
Jagjaguwar
Crack Cloud began in 2015 as a self-preserving creative outlet. In recent years, the Canadian collective have realized that art is more of a retractor that’s beneficial to examine personal wounds rather than a procedure that heals them.
Around their second album, 2022’s Tough Baby, co-founder Zach Choy expressed how one isn’t “guaranteed a form of closure when it comes to committing your thoughts into art form.” So what do you do when art, the thing that you wanted to cure your trauma, becomes a constant reminder of it? Amidst self-doubt and dismal consumerism, Crack Cloud’s third album, Red Mile, soldiers on in hopeful nihilism, insisting to lean into creativity when the process seems futile.
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From the Dead Sea Scrolls to doom-scrolling, Red Mile confronts creative paralysis and our species’ repetitive existential distress. “Another jaded century,” Isabelle Anderson breezily sings on “Epitaph,” questioning creative impulse with a delivery haunted by insecurity, hopelessness, and restlessness. “What do I need to say? / Why do I have to say it?” Despite its density of questions and contradictions, Crack Cloud aren’t in search of answers; there’s an undertone that knowing them wouldn’t make life easier. “No agenda that brings meaning to this life / Meaning’s just a medium for calculated strife,” Choy shouts stiffly on “Blue Kite,” whirly tube synths following in pursuit.
Red Mile is thus far Crack Cloud’s ultimate rock odyssey—a combination of epic poem-leaning lyrics with spacious, anthemic compositions that recall everyone from Gary Numan and early ‘80s David Bowie to Broken Social Scene. Alongside him, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams, Nathaniel Philips, and Jared Drake masterfully synthesize rock-pop history, inserting their own stories between nods to a John Lennon deep cut and odes to the punky reggae party.
Art Jekyll-Hydes between something that helps us explore unstable or scary or confusing parts of ourselves and a dehumanizing weapon that others can use against us. Red Mile is a disarmingly earnest exercise in philosophizing, its dense meta-ness more outlined with every listen. GRADE: A
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