PUP's The Unraveling of PUPTheBand

What is a scream? In metal, it is part of the music, another texture. In rock, it is libidinous, wild, raw. For someone like Yoko Ono, it is a primal scream, something full of resentment, sadness, regret. For Controlled Bleeding, it is a fragment of reality meant to haunt you.

For PUP, it is frustration, and it is frustration at the fact of feeling frustration. It is a sign of being sick of this shit. It is a sign of being sick of oneself and one's own existence.

But, to note, frustration is distinct from hatred. The album is called "The Unraveling of PUPTheBand" (2023), not "The Destruction". You can still recompose a broken machine.

Oh, it's bratty music, with a bratty concept, by a bratty band, for sure. For all we know, Stefan Babcock, with a smile, says, "Oh, me? I'm fine!" at the end of a set. Maybe a wink and a nod should accompany music that mutters under its breath, "I'm not gonna make it, I'm not gonna fucking make it" and then sighs, "Oh, fuck it, I'll get over it."

But that's PUP. And that's life. Life is petty. Life is hypocritical. Life is stupid. And, still, you go on.

I really do believe PUP has some of the best lyrics I've heard in modern music. That probably has more to do with my own tastes than anything, though. I perceive a lot of songwriters carve out a "space" in which they tell their audience, "This is my little bubble world, now see all the neat things I can show in it," and as they perform they nervously pass glances at their audience, hoping the apes are pleased. But if all art are toys, then what's the value of art? Art, even if awkwardly, needs to reflect how people actually feel in the current moment - and, in the moment, hopefully revealing something about the past and the future.

So, Attribute One: PUP has boldness. One of my favorite verses, which I quote constantly, comes from PUP's "Familiar Patterns" (2016):

Falling into familiar patterns, I'm falling back into ruin, I'm getting serious douche chills just being in this room.

Never minding the effortless flow of the -ing verbs, I literally think about "getting serious douche chills" all the time, from myself, from the vanity of other people. Honestly, it's a near-perfect summation of modern existence.

Attribute Two: Imagery, and Terseness. Babcock does not need to paint you a whole picture. Another favorite verse, in "Closure" (2019):

I was starting to fade and I could feel the reaper wading in the tall grass feeding off the fever
And I couldn't figure out why you were down in the cold dirt; something doesn't feel right, I need closure.

Poetry is not about the picture you paint, it's about how the poet feels about the picture they are currently painting in their minds. It's one of the big principles of the Tang Dynasty poets, that of immediacy and vibrancy. And, if we're talking about singing, I can hear Babcock quaver, with anxiety, "I could feel the reaper."

"The Unraveling of PUPTheBand", so far, is their best album in these regards. The content is varied; the emotions are diverse, there's more than just angst; the writing encapsulates many settings and moods; and, frankly, it's just funny. On the latter part, the humor, it is very difficult for a band to be as funny as PUP, without trying to come off as clever, and not be aware of how fucking good they are.

And that's Attribute Three, and this attribute may be the most necessary for an artist to have: The attitude of, This is exactly what I wanted to create, and I'm happy with it even if it sucks the shit out of the balls of Christ.

Fittingly it begins, as every album preceding "Unraveling", with a nervous breakdown in "Totally Fine", starting with a searing guitar solo from Steve Sladkowski:

Hiding out in the back of a parking lot - a thousand choices that I probably should've called off,
Fixate ON EVERY LITTLE THING I don't eat, I don't sleep, I don't do anything!

which is literally the definition of a man tearing himself apart into shreds. The chorus is the famous PUP soccer chant, a veritable anthem for losers and sad sacks:

Lately I've started to feel like I'm slowly dying and if I'm being real I don't even mind;
I was holding back because I JUST COULDN'T DECIDE whether I'm at my worst or I'm totally fine.

What's interesting here is that Babcock mostly eviscerates himself out of his indecision or passiveness. This is in sharp contrast to the opener of "The Dream Is Over" (2016), "Dvp":

Your sister thinks I'm a FREAK, she's been ignoring my calls, we haven't spoken in weeks, I get so drunk that I can't SPEAK, yeah nothing's working and the future's looking bleak.

(OK, technically "If This Tour Doesn't Kill You, I Will" is the actual opener - another beautiful song - but I'm specifically targeting the songs that most contain the PUP "essence".)

Compare also to the titular track of "Morbid Stuff" (2019):

I was bored as fuck, sitting around and thinking all this morbid stuff like if anyone I've slept with is dead and I got stuck on death and dying and obsessive thoughts that won't let up -
It makes me feel like I'm about to throw up.

(You have no idea how much of a pleasure it is to return to these older albums, which just get better under the retrospective glare of "Unraveling". Of particular note for "Morbid Stuff", is the Guitar Hero-esque escalation of the guitar in the intro, interchanged with the drums of Zack Mykula, leading to the first verse. It's the most cinematic PUP has probably ever been, and storytelling, indeed, is what makes "Morbid Stuff" distinct. (I completely forgot how much I've studied this verse in "See You At Your Funeral": "I hope, somehow, I never see you again / and if I do it's at your funeral or better yet / I hope the world explodes, / I HOPE THAT WE ALL DIE, / we can watch the highlights in hell, / I hope they're televised!" It's perfectly balanced.) It's also the same stuff that made me obsessed with PUP when I first heard them in 2019. Anyway, I digress.)

So it's nice that Babcock has moved from crushing despair to morbid stuff to absolute dejection. It's more of a psychological self-destruction than a physical one.

The first question someone may, perhaps, ask, completely alien to the music, is, "Why would anyone listen to such depressing stuff?"

My first thought is: it's music. It either scratches the itch or doesn't. You either get it or you don't. You either find out how it describes your life perfectly, or ... it doesn't.

My second thought is, It's not much different from Pete Shelley, after that blazing intro to "Promises" (1978), singing "Loving you is easy, you are on my side, / we played the game strictly to our rules; / we led the field, a love affair, / which made all other loves fools - / how could you ever let me down?" Same vein: Mick Jones, in "Train In Vain (Stand By Me)" (1979), "You say you stand, by your man, / tell me something, I don't understand, / you said you loved me, and that's a fact, / and then you left me, said you felt trapped." Keep going back, John Lee Hooker in "You're Wrong" (1966) moans, "You're wrong, / little girl, you're wrong, / I try, I try / baby to treat you right, / all you wanted to do to me, / baby, was fuss and fight."

My third thought is, It may be a pleasure distinct to me. My own reflection on the 2000s and 2010s, when I was growing up, was that the times were steeped in conformity. I wouldn't call it an explicit conformity, but it was certainly a technocratic conformity: so long as you do this and this, you'll be successful and happy. The conversation since the beginning of the century revolved around the shrinking of the middle class and income inequality and recessions, as well as the fantastical and oftentimes inexplicable wealth to be found in the data sciences. I find - and this is my perception, I don't know if any of this is true - we continue to saddle kids with more and more on their plate, and tell them their idiosyncrasies are actually flaws. For anyone versed in history, if you examine the lives of artists living in the '60s or '70s, people just ... hung around. They did not have careers. They did not come out of school packaged; educated, certainly, but not forced to have a specific direction in life. Not incidentally, those were some of the best times for music and art in general, and many artists came to their own in this ponderous fashion. Art now is in a weird state.

Nowadays, too, with this "crowdsourcing" of information, you can rather smugly say you're right via mass jury. Everyone and everything is accessible online, and therefore anyone's behavior is up for grabs. You can go on Reddit and talk about how shitty your boyfriend or girlfriend is, with the tacit approval of strangers. Everything can be judged.

And I think my response to that is: Yeah, people are shitty. It's almost as if people were born shitty, and they figure themselves out through adulthood. We live in a tighter and more constrained society where every single action and behavior of yours can be used against you in the court of public opinion.

There's something touching, then, about art that says, "You want me to crash out? Then I'm going to fucking crash-out in the most spectacular way possible. Fuck success, fuck shame, fuck being the better person, and fuck you." What else is someone supposed to do, if you keep piling and piling and piling and piling burdens on their back?

At least PUP, at the end of the day, says, "Alright, I was kinda being an asshole there."

I wouldn't even say the music's value lies in catharsis; its value comes in calling things as they are. Art is expression; the most fundamental layer of art is a person expressing their thoughts. At the bottommost level of a work has to be honesty and sincerity; if the whole thing is hollow, the whole thing collapses. To say there is nothing beautiful in honesty and sincerity is to say there is nothing beautiful in the world, which is what sincerity is getting around at. And so PUP, in my eyes, is constructing a world. I think their world happens to be beautiful.

And this goes into "Robot Writes a Love Song", which contains one of my favorite verses in music ever. But first, some preamble:

You were dead,
I saw your corpse rolled out the door but I backed up your memory before they came for you, monitor was blue, but your data's all stored,
and when they come back with your new body I'll load you into the new machine again and bring you back to me.
And when your motor died so did I it was a slow decline,

leading to a glorious chorus (but before we go on, note how the opening line "you were dead" evokes the themes of "Morbid Stuff"):

Ohhh, the first time I saw you I confess you nearly put me in a cardiac arrest, it was way too much data to process,
and, ohhh, I'm wearing cargo shorts down in Florida, please tell me, is there any room in your aorta for a beta test?
Now my wires have all been exposed and my systems menu won't even load -

now entering into my favorite verse ever;

Black Hole Sun on 102.1 FM - I think I'm going to self-destruct if I ever hear that song again.

That's a poem right there. That's a whole story contained in four lines. It has a background (falling in love, presumably, while listening to Soundgarden), it has an action (listening to Soundgarden in the present tense), and it has a consequence (heartbreak). Fucking amazing.

That being said, it's hard to say what precisely is going on in this song. The song clearly begins with Babcock talking about his computer, but it seems, somehow, the failure of his computer, and possibly losing a history's worth of data, has transported him into failed relationships of the past. I can't call the transition effortless, but the analogy of a machine failing to the human body failing is incredible.

Come to think of it, where PUP has focused on interpersonal relationships in past albums, the focus on objects and external circumstances is quite interesting. It's a way for Babcock to project his own emotions on the world around him, rather than put his anger and disappointment on other people. Both approaches are great for exploring an artist's emotions, but the band gets a lot of the lyrics' detachment here. For example, in the following song "Matilda", Babcock approaches issues of abandonment with the lyrics "Now / you don't even write the chords down, / you don't even play me anyhow, anymore, / now / you just keep cranking them out / like you're trying to numb yourself / like I'm just / a different drug, something that you took for granted, / another love that you abandoned right when / it starts to count."

Now we get to centerpiece "Relentless", which is structurally a very different song from the others. Every song of PUP's is pretty much verse-chorus-verse. "Relentless", instead, is a vertigo of noise - there are verses and choruses, but Babcock doesn't sing the chorus; the choruses are not anthemic and he's joined by other vocals. Where the chorus in a PUP song effectively functions as the theme of the song and, as crucially as it does for pop songs, the vehicle by which the singer comes "loose" and frees themselves from the strictures of their situation, the chorus of "Relentless" is meditative, dreamy, pained.

To look deeper:

It's always the same shit, follow the cracks in the pavement leading back to the constant collapse, that shakes me,
right place at the wrong time right joke with a bad punchline, it's nothing you need to analyze, we're just living la vida loca, baby.
Fuck all the dread, it's endless, you can't kill it like you wanted. And when you try to get ahead, you're relentless, you can never admit how badly you want it.

Frankly, as pained as PUP's song can be, this one feels particularly tortured, what with Babcock describing the continual disappointment and self-loathing he feels going from venue to venue to play the same damn songs over and over again and getting fucking nowhere in life; his hell is so repetitive he doesn't even have the heart to get angry about it anymore. But the worst part about it is, as much as he wants to change, he somehow feels something in him pulling him back.

Leading to the meditative melody, an interplay between Babcock and I think bassist Nestor Chumak, beginning at the 2:16 mark; the melody is like a coil of smoke, wrapping around itself, battling itself. The self-loating and rage just builds up, and up, and up over the course of this interlude. At the 3:03, the band enters a volley, as if a torrent of spirits rushes out:

YOU'VE TAKEN IT ALL, FAILED EVERY SINGLE STEP
AND WHEN YOU HIT THE WALL IT WAS LIKE YOU WERE BORN TO FAIL

Mykula gives the music a great big landing, and Babcock returns, with the true anthem of the song:

FUCK ALL THE DREAD IT'S ENDLESS FUCK ALL THE DREAD IT'S RELENTLESS

The band ends the song on a whirlpool, repeating the chorus over and over again as the machine finally collapses. Honestly, based on all of these features and the effect the band builds, it may actually be their best song.

Next song - after the interlude, anyway - "Waiting" is a "portrait" song, fitting for album "Morbid Stuff", where Babcock creates a character (I don't know if the character has any basis in reality) furious with everything, his life, the government, Alcoholics Anonymous, but most of all with some second person he is stuck with "Waiting For Godot"-style.

And now we get to "Habits", one of my favorite songs in an album full of incredible songs. When I spoke about it in 2022, the first thing I highlighted was the opening, those trap-like drums and the ever-escalating synths which further the album's theme of the human body collapsing as a machine.

Again, Babcock focuses on the objects and the state of his room, as an analogy to his own life:

I'll let you try and contain all of your life in cardboard boxes,
I keep repeating your name walking around in that empty apartment.

As much as I love that one verse in "Robot Writes a Love Song", this is also one of my favorite verses of all time. I think I unconsciously try to mimic it in poetry a lot. "I'll let you try and contain / all of your life in cardboard boxes" is one of those ... how do you say it, perfect psychological portraits that is at once sad and damning. The fact that the singer is saying, "I'll let you try", means they know the subject of the verse is bound for failure; it's tantamount to saying, "I'm watching you surround yourself with the failures of your past lives." It's so ... evocative. There's almost no words to put it.

Then, alone, accompanied only with one guitar,

Told you I'm doing just fine, but to tell the truth: I feel like total shit whenever I'm with you,

with the band coming up at this point,

and I don't change, I just push right through.

Here, Babcock finally completes the analogy between man and machine: I am such a broken and flawed person that my only choice is to just keep doing the same shit and suffer the same hell over and over and over. I don't know if I've ever seen any artist - short of Malcolm Lowry, I guess - tackle this subject, and I've certainly never seen anyone do it so well. Continuing on with the themes of repetitiveness and mechanism, "Ohh, count your regrets / to the time of that leaky faucet, / and that pain in your chest, / it feels good, to know that you haven't lost it yet." If all of my life has been pain, why do I deserve to live in anything else?

If "Habits" has sufficiently depressed you and wiped you out entirely, at least PUP follows up with the slow-moving, introspective "Cutting Off the Corners":

There's no more searching for answers, better leave it anyway
You wonder how it'll feel like when he gets to be your age
And now I'm cutting off the corners, I'm circling the drain, I'm washing out, I'm always looking for the answers, you're always begging me to let you out.

If I had to be candid, I think "Cutting Off the Corners" may be the weakest song on the album, not because of its pacing nor its lack of a catchy chorus, but mostly because of its lack of a strong narrative focus. It does feel like this song is a culmination of the songs prior to it, but this song does not stand on its own. Still, there are haunting lyrics in it: "Still see you everywhere I go / before you shaved your hair, / it was you in the back seat, / it was you in the back of the crowd, I swear."

The following "Grim Reaping", I think, ties the album a lot better and has its own identity. "Grim Reaping" is about the self-destructive tendencies we have, our inclination to deny ourselves love when it's offered and our love for holding grudges, as seen in the chorus:

It's an art how we keep tearing ourselves apart, it's only grim reaping

We divide and obsess where there once was a flame in my chest, it's only grim reaping

followed by, I think, a PUP innovation: a wind section! Apparently there is both a trumpet and a trombone on "Grim Reaping" after the second iteration of the chorus. It's hard not to think of Louis Armstrong when you hear a trumpet, and one can look at "Grim Reaping" as the final "happy", soccer anthem-like song of the album.

Then there's the true ending, "PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy", the loudest, most obnoxious song the band has ever made; where most PUP songs are escalating anxieties, this is just full-on murder. Of particular note is how, after Babcock screams "I THINK I'M GOING TO BLAST OFF", Mykula violently slams the cymbals.

It also has the best one-liners on the album:

TOO OLD FOR TEENAGED TOO YOUNG TO BE WASHED!

I USED TO BE RECKLESS AND TOO BROKE TO EAT NOW ALL OF MY FRIENDS HAVE BIDETS IN THEIR ENSUITES

And then the really funny couplet

SO YOU'RE SELLING INSURANCE? THAT'S SO INSPIRING! GIVE ME TWO MORE YEARS, LET ME KNOW IF THEY'RE HIRING!

It's a crash-out. Nothing matters anymore. What's funny, too, is that I'm not exactly sure what caused it. The humorous nature of the lyrics seems to have come from Babcock's own creative incubation of figuring out what to say when he flips everyone off and bails. In an album full of great songs, this is a highlight.

I'm gonna say, I'm shocked by how much I had to say about this album and the band who made it. Words just kept coming and coming. That's how good this album is, and that's how good the band is: in my eyes they're GOATs in the making; we're going to have to put them in the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame, right next to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. (And to think, this STILL isn't my favorite album of 2022, it's still Bladee & Ecco2K's "Crest" which blows my goddamn mind. My only consolation is that Bladee's work, in the succeeding years with Oklou, Charli XCX, and PinkPantheress, has completely vindicated me, rendering him as a master of the more melancholic aspects of the rave. Though, to this day, I'm still baffled as to who is responsible for "Crest".)

When trying to talk about art, I think it's important to talk about the art - sometimes it's illuminating to see how the art was made and where the artist was during the creation of, but the art itself contains a world, and the critic needs to demonstrate that the art itself suffices and unfolds itself anew on the first and subsequent listens. I'm going to violate this, however. I haven't spoken about the interludes - they don't strike me as very important, when analyzing the music as a whole - but in the first "Four Chords" Babcock says, "All your friends, they hate my guts, / they only listen to noise punk, or nothing, / and they haven't listened to any new music since college, / it all makes them sick to their stomachs / and I never liked them, so they can all shove it." (By the way, the line "They only listen to noise punk, or nothing" is really funny.)

When you look at PUP's YouTube page, you see the songs from "The Dream Is Over" and "Morbid Stuff" have the most views. I mean, some videos have Finn Wolfhard, so that's fair; and when it comes to virality, and this is pretty consistently true for all content, the top 1% in popularity have somewhere to 90% of the viewership (ok, the numbers are not true, but you know what I mean - it's called, rather tongue in cheek, the Matthew Effect). Those two albums have the most views, and then there's a pretty dramatic drop-off for "The Unraveling of PUPTheBand".

I think it's unfair and I think it's fair. One of the things that obsesses me is, everyone loved "Typee" (1846) and "Omoo" (1847), but not "Moby Dick" (1851). The history of art - not to shoot down anyone's dreams! - is that when an artist really expands and expresses more of themself, that's when the audience rejects them. (It's a reminder that "The Sound and the Fury" (1929) was Faulkner's middle finger to the idea of continuing a literary career (which he ended up persevering in, God bless 'em)).

I failed to mention another (guilty) pleasure of listening to PUP, one I admittedly harbored when I was younger: that of vicariously, through the band, screaming and overpowering other people through the medium of the music. There is, indeed, a cathartic element to the music, and this kind of catharsis is common to bands of all stripes: Black Flag, Slipknot, and probably Paramore, from what I've heard.

"The Unraveling of PUPTheBand" has much less of this catharsis, and is about ... being human. It's not about superiority: it's not about the superiority that comes from thinking you're smarter than someone else, or from thinking that you're so clever as to know what "life really is about, man." It's about being wrong, admitting you're wrong, and then maybe admitting there's something wrong with you. It's about admitting life sucks but you have to move on with it.

As the Clash once sang, "All you young punks, / laugh your life, 'cause there ain't much to cry for, / all you young cunts, / live it now, 'cause there ain't much to die for." (And this is on what may be the Clash's most colorful and optimistic album.) You want to fight and rage forever, but forever is as long as now. At some point you have to move on and live. And that's what "The Unraveling of PUPTheBand" is about: being angry to be honest with yourself, and being angry because you care, all for the purpose of living your best life.