Toronto, Ontario’s very own punk powerhouse -- PUP -- will release their excellent new record Morbid Stuff in April, and today the band shares the album’s second single entitled Free At Last.
PUP shared the song’s lyrics and chords with fans a few weeks ago, asking them to do their best cover without ever even hearing the track. While the band expected a handful of covers to be made, they wound up with 253 submissions and a damn good $25 music video, shot entirely on an iPhone in one night to boot. Listen to the song and check out the instructional music video HERE, featuring PUP fans, including the likes of Charly Bliss’ Eva Hendricks, who sings on the original track, as well as Stranger Thingsand Calpurnia’s Finn Wolfhard.
PRE-ORDER MORBID STUFF HERE
Stefan Babcock on the song and video: "The video for 'Free At Last' started off as a very, very stupid concept. Before the song was released, we put out the lyrics and a basic chord chart and asked people to record their own versions without hearing the original first. It was a bit of a social experiment. We expected to receive 15 or 20 covers. We received 253. A lot of them were very… interesting… but most of them were actually really good. We listened to every single one front to back (13 hours and 34 minutes), and by the end our brains were puddles of sludge and we couldn’t remember how our own version sounded.
We received hip hop versions, ska versions, grindcore, EDM, Mariachi, Ukulele, Polka, and piano ballad versions. Incredibly enough, none of the 253 covers sounded like ours. And even more astounding, no two of the covers sounded the same either. The amount of creativity and love put into these things absolutely blew us away."
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR FREE AT LAST HERE
Formed in Toronto five years ago, PUP -- comprised of Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladowski -- quickly became favorites of the punk scene with their first two, critically-beloved albums, winning accolades everywhere from the New York Times to Pitchfork, from NPR and Rolling Stone, and more. Now, with Morbid Stuff, PUP have grown up and doubled down on everything that made you love their first two records. It’s gang’s-all-here vocals, guitarmonies, and lyrics about death. Lots of them. Fitting to their ethos, their new album takes the dichotomy of fun and emotional wreckage in their songs and teeters between gleeful chaos and bleak oblivion while wielding some of the best choruses the band has ever written. Morbid Stuff is also a pretty intense foray into singer Stefan Babcock’s fight with depression, and shows, in perfect PUP fashion, how taking responsibility of his own depression lead him to….laughter. Admitting his depression allowed Babcock to laugh in its face, and the result is that marriage of darkness and joy that made PUP who they are, but in a brand new way. Indeed, despite its dark subject matter, at times Morbid Stuff is funny as hell, even in the music. It’s the most insightful, sweetest, funniest, sickest, angriest, saddest and most inescapably desperate collection of songs they’ve recorded to date. If their self-titled record was the fuse and The Dream Is Over was the bomb going off, Morbid Stuff is your family sifting through the rubble, only to find you giggling while you bleed to death.
MORBID STUFF TRACKLISTING HERE:
1. Morbid Stuff
2. Kids
3. Free At Last
4. See You At Your Funeral
5. Scorpion Hill
6. Closure
7. Bloody Mary, Kate and Ashley
8. Sibling Rivalry
9. Full Blown Meltdown
10. Bare Hands
11. City
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