PUP Write Their Own Eulogy

The punk icons write a satirical farewell and fuck you to, well, themselves

PUP_unraveling of puptheband

PUP:

The Unravelling of PUPTHEBAND

Genre: Punk Pop

Sound: Raucous road-tripping bangers anchored by an edge of vulnerability
If you like: Sorority Noise, Antarctigo Vespucci, Jeff Rosenstock
Why you should listen: Toronto-based rockers PUP are Canadian music scene royalty — and for good reason: their addictive punk-infused tracks hit a sweet spot between mainstream and underground that makes every listener feel like their biggest fan. Their latest album blends the DIY spirit that made them famous with non-stop innovation and endearing earnestness and is sure to keep everyone listening.
Best track: Four Chords

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Beloved Canadian punk band PUP’s latest album, The Unravelling of PUPTHEBAND, is best described as a concept album meets rock opera that serves, essentially, to write their own eulogy. Through sprawling, frantic punk tracks and theatrical power-pop interludes, vocalist Stefan Babcock weaves a darkly comical tale of disillusionment, conflict and, eventually, bankruptcy — but to anyone who’s been watching the band for a while, this should be no surprise. Despite their global success, PUP have been warning us about their imminent demise since the very beginning.

Their name itself stands for “Pathetic Use of Potential” and several of the fast-paced tracks on their breakout album (titled The Dream Is Over, another reference to the band’s cynically tongue-in-cheek outlook) screamed out tales of self-loathing and internal tensions with whiplash-inducing neuroticism. Babcock’s relentless criticism of his own art never held back; his work often served to tear itself apart and its creator with it. In 2019’s pop-punk masterclass Morbid Stuff, he openly marvels at his own continued relevance: “I’m just surprised the world isn’t sick of grown men whining like children,” he shouts on the track Full Blown Meltdown.

Yes, PUP have always been a band with a death wish, which makes their prodigious talent almost seem like a cruel twist of fate. Despite their apparent hunger for the end, they can’t seem to stop putting out addictively catchy, palpably cathartic records — there are few bands working today that capture the spiralling angst of the millennial burnout generation quite like they do.

Unravelling uses a motif of regular piano interludes to interrupt more typical punk tracks with meta-aware ramblings about the demands of a fictional Board of Directors. The album’s opener, Four Chords, is the first of these tracks, and despite its relentless self-criticism — Babcock professes his own inadequacy at playing the track before predicting that his friends, and presumably his fans, will hate it — it’s one of my favourite PUP tracks ever. The minimalistic, jangling piano eventually reaches a climax before collapsing into a cacophonous finale that’s reminiscent of a Neutral Milk Hotel song.

After Four Chords, the album breaks into the punk thrashing of Totally Fine, a classic-sounding PUP track that emphasizes Babcock’s regular deliberations on toxic relationships, nihilism and apathy. The album stays strong from here — the next track, Robot Writes A Love Song, is a quirky power-pop earworm that feels custom-built for a summer playlist.

As the album continues, PUP’s seemingly endless existential anguish might get a little monotonous, but this depends heavily, I suppose, on your appetite. An album about the dissolution of a punk band might seem like a niche, even unrelatable topic, but they manage to make their themes universal — after all, who can’t relate to losing their passion for something that once meant everything to them? Who can’t relate to self-sabotage or the romanticization of our own destruction?

The album ends with the band declaring bankruptcy after getting cut off mid-song by the Board. Their final track, PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy, is by far the darkest and most aggressively nihilistic on the album — it sounds like a final, manic fuck you to the industry, with a bridge that reads like a suicide note (“I’m just being dramatic,” Babcock reassures us immediately afterwards). But even in this pit of destruction, they won’t sign off entirely “I’m failing upwards again / I might pull it off,” wails the track’s guitar-heavy chorus.

The band makes one thing clear — they might be falling apart, but they’re not going to stop writing about it. The result is an album that’s truly special, with the unfiltered fanaticism of a breakdown but the clear-eyed control of a murder. In Unravelling, PUP is simultaneously the Titanic, the passengers and the orchestra playing them to their deaths.

 

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