Photo Credit: Michael Crusty
Toronto art-punk provocateurs Bad Waitress return October 2 with “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk,” the second advance single from their new album In The Hollow, arriving October 30 via Stomp Records. Following August’s ferocious first taste “Lovin’ Kind,” the new single pushes further into the uncomfortable territory surrounding the record, turning intoxication, attraction and self-disgust into a bleary collision of jagged art-punk, garage-punk abrasion and wiry post-punk tension. There’s a nasty little contradiction sitting at the centre of “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk.” The title sounds like a joke you might regret making the next morning, but the song itself keeps digging beneath the punchline. “You horrify me / Make everything shit around me,” Kali-Ann Butala spits at the outset, only to admit moments later that she’s still drawn in. Desire becomes something embarrassing and invasive, the kind of attraction that seems to make less sense the closer you look at it.
Bad Waitress make that confusion sound appropriately unstable. Katelyn Molgard’s and Butala’s guitars, Nicole Cain’s bass and Moon’s drums drive the song forward while the refrain keeps returning with increasingly less room for ambiguity: “I only like you when I’m drunk / I only like you when I’m fucked up and crazy.” By the back half, language itself starts falling apart. Thoughts get clipped short, the song locks onto “I’m fucked up on the decline,” and what began as an ugly admission starts sounding almost triumphant. That mixture of discomfort and release has long been part of Bad Waitress’ appeal. Emerging from Toronto’s punk underground with 2018’s Party Bangers: Volume 1 before stretching into the heavier, more jagged terrain of 2021’s No Taste, the quartet built a reputation for songs that could be confrontational without becoming humourless. Their music can sneer, lurch and explode, but there’s usually a crooked grin somewhere in the wreckage. It’s taken them from cramped rooms at home to stages alongside Fucked Up, L7, Rise Against, Wolf Parade and The Bronx, with comparisons ranging from The Stooges and Fugazi to Yeah Yeah Yeahs along the way.
Recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto and produced by Bad Waitress, In The Hollow arrives after a period in which all four members found themselves confronting different kinds of isolation and change. Old relationships and memories began looking different with distance, while questions around gender, sexuality and identity surfaced with new clarity. Rather than turning those experiences into tidy revelations, the band became interested in the less comfortable process of recognizing what no longer fits and figuring out what, if anything, comes next. “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk” catches that process at its least dignified. There’s no enlightened narrator standing safely on the other side of a bad relationship here. They’re still inside it, horrified by the attraction, ashamed of wanting it and looking for enough chemical distance to make the contradiction temporarily bearable. Whether the object of that fixation deserves the contempt is beside the point. The song stays locked inside the narrator’s own warped perspective.
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That makes it a different kind of preview than “Lovin’ Kind.” Where the first single kept intimacy at arm’s length, “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk” is already tangled up in it. Both songs circle desire and self-preservation, but this one is sweatier, uglier and considerably less interested in pretending anyone has control. With In The Hollow, Bad Waitress aren’t offering a clean account of who they became during the five years between records. The album is more interested in what gets dragged along with you: old relationships, old instincts, old versions of yourself that have a habit of resurfacing when your judgment is at its worst. “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk” finds Bad Waitress right there in the middle of it, horrified, attracted, fucked up and, for the moment at least, feeling just fine.
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