The pop-punk band’s six-track follow-up to last year’s Morbid Stuff invites listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it.
This virus has taken so much from us, not least of all my right to break my nose in the pit at a PUP show. Way back in February, when COVID-19 was still just a scary headline to scroll past, I wanted, desperately, to hit their set in Peterborough, a small town outside of Toronto. (All the members of PUP hail from Hogtown, as do I.) But the last Greyhound back to the city would leave the station long before the show’s conclusion: a one-two punch, usually, of “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” and “DVP;” unmissable. Because I couldn’t afford an Airbnb, and because my efforts to arrange a carpool via r/puptheband proved fruitless, in the end, I threw up my hands. “Oh, well,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll play more hometown shows this year.”
Eight months on, as I write this review, perched at my kitchen table in the apartment I’ve not left in seven months, I wish I’d made Peterborough work. This is the very intentional irony in the title of This Place Sucks Ass, a six-track follow-up to last year’s excellent Morbid Stuff, composed largely of outtakes from PUP’s recording sessions for that album. “This place sucks ass” was something the band used to say “as a joke a million times on tour,” says frontman Stefan Babcock, whether they were performing in “Lethbridge, Alberta or New York City.” Like many of you, I’ve been yearning this year for any show, anywhere, no matter how much the place sucks ass.
I especially miss pits. I miss tossing my body into a sweat-slick crowd of other bodies, inviting harm instead of hiding all year from it. On these new songs, PUP emphasize the ways pain demands to be felt. In the past, the band offered a simple solution to the agony caused by drugs and alcohol: more drugs and alcohol. This time around, there’s no such numbing. On opening ragers “Rot” and “Anaphylaxis,” Babcock confronts his body in vivid, tangible terms: blood spilling, hives swelling, tissue turning green. There are no chemical solutions in these songs, whether licit (“I took the medicine, it wasn’t working”) or otherwise. Hell, in the chorus of “Anaphylaxis,” Babcock sings “way too stoned” like it’s a bad thing. These songs are acutely aware of physical pain. They invite listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it. It’s a remarkable shift for a band whose previous therapeutic suggestions involved going “numb, and losing feeling” before barreling ramsquaddled down the Don Valley Parkway at 180 kilometers per hour.
Drunk and disorderly conduct still pops up on This Place Sucks Ass, but it’s tempered now by a newfound conscience and a commitment to recovery. Reeling from a break-up on “Nothing Changes,” Babcock requests “a quiet lull, some books, and alcohol,” before promising to “begin again” in the morning. Though the weary chorus complains that “nothing changes, no, nothing ever changes,” echoing the sentiment of 2016’s “Familiar Patterns,” it’s very evident that something has changed. Four years ago, an average evening looked like “knocking back Jell-O shooters till I puked in the kitchen;” these days, he makes do with a glass of wine and a good book. The stunning closer “Edmonton” does see our hero returning to old, bad habits—hunched drunk over a urinal, awash in guilt over missing friends’ birthdays “and a couple of funerals.” Here, though, the regret feels useful. The song flies by, a “Full Blown Meltdown”-esque rager condensed to a mere seventy seconds, but it has the quality of a man stepping outside of himself and floating through a moment frozen in time. He looks at his bandmates on the stage, feels searing guilt for “singing songs about killing them,” and mourns a friend whose “body… is still warm in the ground.”
PUP is beloved for diaristic songs about venting anger in unhealthy, dangerous, and even violent ways. These struggles have not disappeared now that they’ve earned a couple of Polaris nods and dived off some big stages and played the hits for adorable head-banging puppets on Canadian children’s television. Babcock sings movingly, in “Rot,” of his ongoing struggle with self-loathing, despite all the listeners who look up to him, who sing his lyrics back to him at shows. He rehearses an acceptance speech, delivering a superb, sneering, “I wanna thank the Academy,” but wonders privately whether he even deserves recognition, whether he’s not just full of shit. If the record feels like PUP’s most forward-looking, optimistic music ever, it may be an attempt to reckon with this new role-model status. There is an honest wish, in their cover of Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180,” to imagine a future where “something good happens.” The weak nihilism of “Nothing Changes” doesn’t even survive to the end of its chorus: “Even if the wait is long, and all the words are wrong/Put the recorder on, and I’ll begin again.” They sound like they’re about five seconds from hollering about orcas. If The Dream is Over dramatized the one-step-forward-five-steps-back reality of recovery, and Morbid Stuff rejected the practice of reveling in sadness, This Place Sucks Ass is a dispatch from beyond the moment of catharsis, after the floodgates have closed, sucking down shitty instant coffee in the back row of your 20th or 30th AA meeting.
Really, though, all of this is a continuation of the familiar PUP ethos: standing up and screaming about what ails thee is vastly preferable to standing still and shutting up about it. Before the term was bastardized by roommates who never fill up the fucking Brita, “emotional labor” described the work of managing emotion in the low-wage service sector. There is something truly soul-killing about earning five bucks an hour to grin into the face of a shrieking Karen, to not even wince as the spittle flies out of her mouth and paints your face. Conversely, there is freedom in being forthright about your feelings, ridding yourself of any requirement to slap on a smile while your whole world crumbles. If you can rise to your feet and declare proudly that this place sucks ass, you’ve taken the first step toward creating a place that sucks less ass.
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