Crack Cloud come up for air

There’s a reason why so many musicians have written and recorded albums in Joshua Tree. The Mojave is sparse and desolate, eerie in its silence, cooked sand dotted with alien-seeming flora and carnivorous fauna. Day-to-day distractions disappear. It is the perfect place to breathe.

The mostly Calgary-based punk collective Crack Cloud started in 2016 presenting “art as a means of performative and rehabilitative healing,” tied together by histories of addiction, mutinous energies, and an expansive set of influences. They sounded obtuse and vital, the group’s founder, lead singer, and drummer Zach Choy a snarling presence in the foreground, and they carried that energy through two increasingly expansive albums, 2020’s Pain Olympics and 2022’s Tough Baby. In the six years from their formation through the end of that tour, they didn’t rest. Some members dropped out, some stepped in to replace them, different formations toured the world, and the machine kept rolling.

Finally, in 2022, they had a chance to stop and think about reconciling their personal lives with their lives as musicians. For Choy, that meant making a Crack Cloud record, channeling his thoughts onto the page. The lineup was set at a relatively modest seven musicians: Choy, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams, and Nathaniel Philips, with Aidan Pontarini working as their Creative Director. Within a few months of leaving the road, they’d decamped to the outskirts of Joshua Tree in the Mojave, where Cloghesy had set up a studio, and started work on what would become their third album, Red Mile, out now via Jagjaguwar.

Red Mile by Crack Cloud

The record is confounding and occasionally cryptic, smart and very self-conscious. Choy spent much of his time in the desert trying to understand the lives of his grandparents, who had fled China for Canada during Mao’s Great Leap Forward; he read history at night, alone. “Blue Kite,” the third track on the record, nods to Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1993 film The Blue Kite, a story about social conformity through the Cultural Revolution — a fitting cultural touchstone for a man with “Laughing At The System” tattooed above his bellybutton. “The Medium,” the lead single from the album, is a meta-commentary on pop music and a reference to Canadian cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan, its melody intentionally calibrated as a piece of performance art as much as a pop song. Speaking to Choy, Khan, and Cloghesy, the latter of whom was calling in from the desert with a background so stereotypically Joshua Tree it could have been a green screen, I wondered if going to the desert itself was another part of the carefully orchestrated image: What if we made a rock album in the desert, like Queens of the Stone Age!

But even as you begin to peel back those layers, Red Mile remains a visceral, vivid rock record. “Epitaph” grapples with the lineage of ideas through history, but the germ of that idea allows the song to blossom into a beautifully minimal downtempo pop song. “Lost on the Red Mile” is sweeping and grand and seductively freeform, the result of freeform improvisation and a deep understanding of harmony. “The Medium” might be a meta-commentary on pop structures, but it also nails those structures.

Just before Red Mile’s release, I spoke with three-sevenths of the band about the Mojave Desert, “The Medium,” and freefalling through time.

The FADER: What effect did the desert have on this album?​​

Zach Choy: It’s interesting that we gravitated to such a desolate environment, and I think it’s somewhat indicative of our mental state at the time, a liminal space that we were wavering in and between as a group and in our personal lives. Crack Cloud has been around for almost a decade, and all of that time has felt so compressed. But as soon as touring came to an end in 2022, we had to confront a lot about the trajectory we were on – this duality that we were living, being on the road and then the other side here at home cultivating families.

Rehabilitation was at the forefront of the whole inception of the group. Time goes on and we change as people, and I think there was an arrested development that eventually crept up on us. We had to come home dig into ourselves and align ourselves with what, after all of this time, we consider valuable and important for our health and for our own creative spirituality. That really guided us into the desert, and I think it’s quite curious and profound when I think about it in retrospect. There’s something so interesting about the psychophysical and how we manifest our environment. The metaphor of it, the elemental properties of the desert, and the destitution of it all is really conducive to the kind of reflection that we required as a group and as people.

When you did come off tour, did you think about reflecting in a way that wasn’t getting music down onto tape? Did you think about taking a real break?

ZC: It didn’t occur to us. We adapted our sound and the configuration of our group and our output in general. There’s a lot to explore with these themes of ambivalence and exhaustion that one can and will experience in life, especially when your life revolves around a lot of traveling and is egocentric – which you can’t separate from making art. There’s this ceaseless psychoanalysis that you’re partaking in as a creative person, and then when you introduce a public platform and when you introduce cultural rhetoric, it’s a very peculiar thing. It’s not for the faint of heart, and I think a lot of people try to avoid these feelings. I mean, people don’t avoid it; people burn out, people die. We see the adverse effects of what it looks like to be a creative in the world, especially with the backdrop of 2024, but to infinity throughout history. It’s an interesting preoccupation.

We were feeling up against ourselves, and instead of taking a cynical route or a combative route, we found just this lucidity and the quietude of the desert. Maybe there’s a quietude to the album. It embodies our work in Joshua Tree and what we’ve been up to the last year.

You’re talking about art there as a sort of egocentrism. But Crack Cloud’s roots are in punk and community. Is there a friction between those things?

ZC: I think community is as fluid as identity itself. And over time I suspect that everyone experiences these fluctuations in their environment and in the people that they surround themselves and their own idealisms and politics. There was this nostalgic sort of sentimentality that we felt like we needed to cling onto at a certain point in our development as a group. We came out of a really strong narrative, and I think people resonated with it, and it sure as hell helped a lot of us – but that’s not the end of any story.

Even as an addict, you don’t cross the checkpoint and then it’s over and it’s this mellow, static wash of balance and catharsis. It’s changing all the time, and, on a macro scale too, culture changes. I would say that Crack Cloud is just very symptomatic of the ebb and flow of our time and place as a generation, as a culture, and also as people making observations and dedicating our time to embodying them through art. I suspect it’ll look very different five years from now. And two years from now.

You were reading about Mao and the Great Leap Forward. What were you reading specifically?

ZC: History. Over my life, there’s been a cumulative desire to understand my heritage and to be able to contextualize my grandparents – what their world looked like, what the political climate looked like, what prompted them to come to Canada. I think that as a first-generation person here in Canada, at a certain point, you have to reconcile with your environment. There’s something paradoxical because, in one sense, this is all you, and any kind of ambivalence you have for the culture feels trivial when you know that your grandparents left a lot behind to cultivate a new life in a new place. To understand those motivations, to understand what they intended to do when leaving their home behind, was compelling.

How conscious was the rest of Crack Cloud about what Zach was bringing lyrically and conceptually?

Aleem Khan: First, we’re always having debates, philosophical discussions, throwing jokes at each other, whatever. The beauty of this setup is that we’re all open to each other’s personal perspectives. But it’s universal perspectives that Zach is really writing about. He has these beautiful metaphors and analogies on the record. You can hear references to true things within history that absolutely do relate to this day and age. For example, the melody of our song, “The Medium,” the chords chosen, and the production of it.

It’s pretty much a worldview that still needs to be explored and needs to have the ability to breathe and needs to be able to flourish. So, whatever notes you play or chords you choose, whatever instruments you know how to play, regardless of any of this stuff, unity and respect are ultimately the true guiding principles that allow us to have these conversations.

Throughout the album Zach sings about being unrestrained or freed. It sounds like, especially the way that you’re talking about “The Medium,” that means being free to explore genre, explore sounds, or explore ideas – even explore different times without being limited.

ZC: I was having a conversation with Aidan Pontarini, who has been creatively essential to all of the output for Red Mile. We were talking about risk and how not only is it relative, but it’s also subjective what risk looks like for different people. Crack Cloud is chronically in this state of risk, trying to do what is antithetical to what we’ve already done. In a way, this record feels like a regression historically and stylistically – the way that we’ve decidedly returned to this older way of recording and of writing. The production is far more scaled back and there’s a lot of tradition to it, but that’s not really something that we’ve ever entertained before. And so as late bloomers to return to this old world felt very much like the kind of risk we wanted to take on, and there’s something very freeing about that.

The film The Blue Kite, which is explicitly referenced on the record, was important to you, Zach. Again it foregrounds this idea of creativity and freedom being stifled – something you emphatically counteract with the album cover. What drew you to The Blue Kite and how do you think it’s drawn out on the record?

ZC: Partially it has to do with heritage. But beyond that, there was this strong criticism of conformity in the movie in relation to the communist regime at the time. It felt so adjacent to a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the gatekeeping we experience today. I’ve always personally struggled with conformity, and I don’t say that proudly or idealistically. I think there’s just an issue there, and I’ve utilized that. I’ve transformed that into the way that I make art. In 2024, post-punk feels like such an archaic, redundant, pretentious way to describe what is basically an institution or an industry in and of itself. And there’s a lot of posturing around the genre, a lot of retrograde feelings about what constitutes this or that. We wanted to abandon all of those notions and start from the ground up. Visually we were able to connect to that sentiment through the metaphor of the skydiver. Creatively, and musically, that’s what we set out to do. And that’s what we did.

It’s funny that you put “The Medium” in that context because I heard it on one level as an earnest celebration of rock music.

AK: I’ve studied music history since I started playing the electric guitar at age 12. And so 50s and 60s culture, pop culture, music, film, fashion, food, these types of things. I love those old pop songs. But those things were the veil for deep hardship.

Being humorous guys… we love improvising. We can play the hell out of whatever you want. But dumb it down, less is more. [We were] dumbing it all down and making a really simple, catchy little melody to kind of piss you off. But still, together we really mean what we’re saying with anything we do. We really, really deeply mean it.

ZC: When there’s something we’re navigating with Crack Cloud – and this goes towards life itself and any kind of emotional state – I think art’s a fun way to speak to these. It was this idea of us signing to a label and the pretensions that are attached to that, the sort of contingencies that you would imagine – which the label that we work with, they’ve been nothing but accommodating and supportive of all of our idiosyncrasies. But there was something preemptive to writing “The Medium” as a sellout song. As indulgent as it is and was, I think we got a good laugh out of making it. And there’s also a history to it, a history to the chords.

There’s a language in the chords that dates back hundreds of years, and there’s something really beautiful in that as well. Alex, as you’ve said, there’s something to celebrate and not to brush off about the potency of pop music and of melody and of timelessness. “The Medium” is by no means original. It’s throughout the centuries, and it will continue to be used by groups long after we’ve perished. There’s a celebration in that too.