“You know my story, yeah, I’m just a fucking addict.” So runs a standout line early on in ‘Blue Kite’, the lead single from Canadian collective Crack Cloud’s third album and first for Jagjaguwar. For those unfamiliar, the ever-shifting lineup first came together in 2017, Zach Choy’s solo project expanding through meeting members in various recovery programmes, designed as a ‘healing mechanism’ with a revolving door member policy. Their origins have been well documented at this stage (“Road to recovery, an early talking point”), but they’re now almost a decade on from the project’s genesis, with as many members as you’d think necessary to bring their sound to life. They’re on seven and a creative director this go- around, and everyone counts.

Like their 2020 debut, Pain Olympics, Red Mile is an 8-song set; unlike their debut, it’s the first record they haven’t put out themselves. It’s also a good 16 minutes longer, with songs given the requisite space to breathe. Save for a necessary fade-out on ‘I Am (I Was)’, that dissolves into a group-vocal coda after four minutes of twists and turns, every single idea here is allowed to blossom into its most complete form. It’s not just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, either: opener ‘Crack of Life’ introduces the group’s ethos with more than a little mischief at play, the band celebrating their connection and trying things because they can and not necessarily because they should; Choy’s perfectly imperfect vocals just about manage to stay afloat above everything else, but they do far more than simply make it work.

‘The Medium’ is an excoriating look at four-chord pop songs, set to (you guessed it) a four-chord pop song in C major that carries the same kind of ‘peppy plastic melodies we hear every day’, a nod and a wink at themselves and their audience, the repackaging of punk aesthetics and commentary on Crack Cloud’s place in the figurative food chain. The self-referential nature of the song doesn’t stop there; ‘Lack of Lack’ shares only its name with a 20-second interlude from 2018’s self-titled compilation album, opening out into a meditative slow jam that’s sandwiched between extended instrumental breaks, full of brass and auxiliary percussion.

Fascinated by the idea of creation for its own sake, ‘Epitaph’ finds the band further pondering their place, Choy and Eve Adams trading verses as the song unfurls around them: “What do I need to say? What do I have to say?” Far more than ‘writing with some vague intent’, the band’s genreless approach to their music, fleshed out more than ever before, means you’re just as likely to hear a detour into a strings section as you are floaty psychedelia or windswept, full-bodied indie rock. Driven by a sense of restlessness, the album’s 45-minute runtime seems to pass in a flash, with pseudo-title track ‘Lost on the Red Mile’—named, so as the album, for a street in Calgary where the band found its home—stretching past eight minutes and making every second count, bringing the album full circle with a ‘Crack of Life’ callback before immediately cutting loose for a declamatory instrumental that brings the listener back to earth.

The cover art for the record is a perfect encapsulation of the music contained therein; a punk skydiver in freefall for the sheer thrill of it. Three albums in, Crack Cloud have reinvented themselves as a full-throated rock band, expressing that reinvention in ways that only start revealing themselves after a few listens. Red Mile is a whirlwind, and Crack Cloud clearly enjoyed themselves whipping it up. Who knows where they could go from here? We’re not sure even they do, and that’s an incredibly exciting prospect.

order The Red Mile HERE