Announced for release 13th September 2024 on Deathwish (US), Dine Alone (Canada), and Big Scary Monsters (UK/EU), ‘Chastity’ is a 13-track record about the things that have always run through Chastity’s records — struggle, death, despair, redemption, darkness, and light — but this time, the songs ascend to new depths of intensity and desperation, new heights of resolution and power. “It’s really about the first nosedive that I did as a young person,” says instigator Brandon Williams who *is* Chastity. “It’s a record about struggle, about the missing years. It’s also a thank you to some people in my life.”
The announcement of the new album comes alongside the release of a new single in the form of ‘Jaw Locked’, which comes crashing through speakers / headphones with a wall of glorious, pounding major-key guitars. It drives forward, relentless and crackling with energy, while Williams revisits the feeling of voiceless loneliness — with a full, determined belt. He wants to hear people scream it with him. “I think the idea of people singing along with me about a time in my life where I was feeling like my voice didn’t count for anything is a relief for me,” he says. “It’s like the circle has been closed in a way, it’s like finally the lonely can all be together.”
Chastity is for the skids, the headbangers, the freaks. Chastity is for everyone who has suffered and survived the lethal combination of suburban overculture and mental distress. Chastity is especially for everyone who didn’t survive — the ones who didn’t get out. Brandon Williams did, luckily, and his work with Chastity has been to collect people like him, who got out by the skin of their teeth.
Chastity’s first three full-length records — 2018’s ‘Death Lust’, 2019’s ‘Home Made Satan’, and 2022’s ‘Suffer Summer’ — formed a trilogy that defined a 4-year arc of the band’s contribution to outsider music. Each record was informed by Williams’ life, but each was also conceptual and interpretive, refracting his experiences through a level of remove. On Chastity’s upcoming, self-titled fourth record, there is no such distance: Williams decided to write a fully non-fiction work.
The record hurtles through melodic hardcore, shoegaze, and emo, all magnificently and enormously rendered thanks to slick work from John Paul Peters (Propagandhi, Comeback Kid), who engineered and mixed the record. The band recorded at Peters’ Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg in March 2024. Chastity’s guitars have never sounded so immediate and towering, sometimes exploding into a sputtering, ripped-speaker chaos; and there are perhaps the most ferocious bass and drums sounds of the year on Chastity, splitting the difference between gnarly-as-fuck generator-show tones and vividly textured, hi-fi chest-beaters.
The new record arrives on the heels of a whirlwind six years for Chastity. Williams founded the project in Whitby Ontario. From the start, it’s been a project of absolution via community connection. There weren’t any venues for independent punk music in the suburban town, so Williams and his friends started throwing punk shows in a barn on Whitby’s rural outskirts. People took notice: Before long, Ontario punk stalwarts like PUP and Metz were making the pilgrimage to the barn to headline gigs, and profits from the shows went to a regional youth mental health services. Chastity spent the next years touring North America including shows with Sunny Day Real Estate, Alexisonfire, and Deafheaven.
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