A Better Treatment (Clear & Black Splatter)

• Track Listing

Spice singer Ross Farrar speaks of the band's ambition to forge a sort of

aesthetic patois: a mode of expression as strikingly regional as it is

recognizable. Last year's self-titled debut, released in the depths of the

pandemic, fully achieved this goal, distilling decades of North Bay punk

and post-hardcore into an urgent, artful set of emotive unrest. Their latest

single, A Better Treatment b/w Everyone Gets In, further refines the

group's singular mix of weathered melody and abrasive poetics, equal

parts bracing, bruised, and cryptic.

"A Better Treatment" began as a song about a friend who died but

through the turmoil of collaboration transformed into something more

macroscopic and opaque, blurring the boundary between hopeful and

defeated ("I thought loving someone would cure my self-hatred"). Bass

and drums build against walls of guitar while the violin threads it's own

melancholy within the noise; Farrar is blunt about the intention: "The violin

is an instrument of death you know."

"Everyone Gets In" is both poppier and more pained, an anthem for angst

aging into the reverie of regret: "We lose our strength / along the way / we

lose each other / the funeral sways." The tempo sways too, gradually

slowing to an anxious crawl before finally revving back into a storm of

shimmering guitar and splashing drums, fighting against the dying of the

light. It's music of raw truths and rejected pedestals, storied but

unswerving, a revolt against the great regress: "and my / my time is spent

/ adoring seasons / that I / I never should've."