Five years can leave a lot of ghosts behind. On October 30, Toronto punk quartet Bad Waitress return with In The Hollow, their new full-length album via Stomp Records, and a record built from the strange experience of meeting old relationships, old memories and old versions of yourself from somewhere further down the road. Self-produced and recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto, In The Hollow takes the volatile punk Bad Waitress built their name on and stretches it into something darker and more expansive: jagged art-punk, post-punk tension and garage-punk abrasion colliding with moments of eerie space and reflection. Made up of Kali-Ann Butala, Katelyn Molgard, Moon and Nicole Cain, Bad Waitress have never been particularly interested in keeping things tidy. Their music can be funny, furious, uncomfortable and strangely inviting all at once, with roots running through the confrontational punk of L7 and Babes In Toyland, the wiry art-school instincts of Wire and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the heavier noise-rock pull of METZ. In The Hollow keeps those instincts intact, but the world around them has changed.
The album grew out of several years of collective and personal isolation, when distance gave the four members time to reconsider relationships, identity and parts of themselves that once seemed fixed. Experiences around gender and sexuality surfaced alongside the creation and loss of important relationships, while old memories began looking different from the other side of change. Rather than turn those years into a record about despair, Bad Waitress became interested in what happens afterward: the uncomfortable work of letting go of what no longer serves you without knowing exactly what will replace it. Even the landscape around the songs began to shift. Some members of Bad Waitress grew up around the Northwest Territories and Pacific Northwest, and memories of those places found their way into the record as emotional scenery: dark forests, vast stretches of wilderness and a sense of mysticism far removed from the cramped Toronto rooms where the band first made its name. The imagery isn’t an escape from the album’s personal questions so much as a way of giving them somewhere to live. Isolation can mean being trapped inside a room, but it can also mean standing somewhere enormous and realizing just how small you are.
Across ten tracks, In The Hollow keeps moving between those two kinds of space. The previously released “Lovin’ Kind” opens the door with intimacy already turning hostile, attraction and self-preservation pulling in opposite directions as Butala warns, “I’m not the lovin’ kind.” “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk” staggers further into the contradiction, where lust survives alongside disgust and intoxication becomes the only distance capable of making either tolerable. Together, the singles establish a record where relationships rarely behave themselves, but they’re only part of the picture. Release-week focus track “45” changes the temperature. Instead of recoiling from its subject, the song looks at a flawed, booze-soaked character with surprising tenderness: a crooked smile, cigarettes, rambling conversations and the repeated insistence that “he’s only 45.” There’s frustration in the portrait, but also affection and the wish that things could have gone differently. As the song moves from “I know he wants to be a better guy” toward “I wish I could give him a better life,” Bad Waitress allow compassion to sit beside disappointment without forcing either one to win.
Elsewhere, the album gets stranger. “Galleria Shopping Centre” turns a mundane day of shoes, coffee, dollar stores and getting your nails done into a woozy little consumerist fever dream, its narrator trying to get some shopping done while admitting they’re far too high to function normally. “The Hunt” goes in the opposite direction, filling the frame with bones, guns, spears, storms and a heart “bleeding black.” The title track “In The Hollow” brings cello from Michael Peter Olson into the band’s world as spiritual imagery turns bleak and confrontational, its repeated cry of “God is dead” eventually giving way to graves, betrayal and dust. That cello returns on closing track “Low,” where the record seems to collapse inward. After all the confrontation, intoxication and grotesque humour surrounding it, the song is almost painfully direct: “I feel low / So low.” Lies, disappearance and emotional dependence creep through the track while the narrator waits for tomorrow and whatever fate happens to bring with it. There is no grand revelation waiting at the end, just the recognition that some things have to be lived through before they can be understood.
That refusal to clean up the mess has followed Bad Waitress from the beginning. Emerging from Toronto’s underground with 2018’s Party Bangers: Volume 1, the band pushed into heavier territory on 2021’s No Taste, earning praise for a sound New Noise Magazine called an “all-out punk assault,” while Exclaim! described their evolution as “a new type of rage.” Along the way they’ve shared stages with Fucked Up, L7, Rise Against, Wolf Parade and The Bronx, carrying the intensity of their earliest rooms into increasingly bigger ones. But In The Hollow isn’t particularly interested in recreating the band Bad Waitress were five years ago. If No Taste found power in rage, this record is more willing to sit with uncertainty. People change. Relationships disappear. Identity moves underneath you. Sometimes you look backward and recognize yourself; sometimes you don’t.
Bad Waitress still meet all of that the way they know how: loudly, strangely, with humour intact and no particular interest in pretending they’ve figured everything out. As the band puts it, “We hope these songs offer listeners a space to process their own experiences while encouraging empathy for perspectives different from their own.” In The Hollow makes room for exactly that. Not an answer, not a clean break, but somewhere to stand while the old version of yourself disappears into the trees.
