LISTEN / STREAM “A.M. 180” (GRANDADDY COVER) HERE
ANNOUNCE PUPTHEZINE VOL.4 “QUARANZINE”
STREAM / BUY MORBID STUFF HERE
"Morbid Stuff just still sounds like friends having fun and making catchy, cathartic punk anthems for teens and almost-adults alike — offering a brief, but much needed respite from the hell that is everyday life...their strongest album to date." - Exclaim! (9/10)
“Morbid Stuff is one of the best fast-and-loud records you’ll hear this year...While they’re filed under “punk” at the record store, that label doesn’t begin to do them justice.” - Georgia Straight
“A stupidly catchy and thoroughly good-humoured collection of shout-along anthems...the album is like a big, warm hug from a close friend who’s finally lured you out of your darkened apartment after three days in bed telling you you’re not alone, you’re not the first person to be sad and you will get through this,” - Toronto Star
"If you're gonna start a record, you might as well do it right. I just cannot get enough of this record. I think it's one of my favorite records of the year. Easily...musically it's explosive. It is huge." - NPR Music's New Music Friday Podcast
"'Morbid Stuff' is the angriest PUP has ever sounded. But it’s not a cry for help. It’s a cry of freedom, the sound of a band realizing that anger is liberating..." - Pitchfork (7.9)
Photo Credit : Jess Baumung // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
PUP have shared a cover of one of their favorite songs today, a genius take on indie rock band Grandaddy’s timeless track “A.M. 180.”
“Grandaddy are one of the unsung hero bands of indie rock,” says PUP’s drummer Zack Mykula. “A best kept secret. I mean, forgive me for going ham, but this song is like a lily in an otherwise barren valley. An outstanding piece of songwriting, doing more with less than most any other song of the same caliber. So, that's why we decided to cover it.”
LISTEN / STREAM “A.M. 180” (GRANDADDY COVER) HERE
SINGLE ARTWORK // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
PUP have also announced that they will be releasing PUPTHEZINE Vol. 4 titled “QUARANZINE”. The issue will include cut-out PUP figurines, a postcard, each band members’ resume, guitar tabs for “Anaphylaxis”, a pedal board breakdown, a flexi-disc of a ska song written in quarantine (hailed as “a truly unparalleled, transcendent musical masterpiece” by PUP themselves) and much much more. Order it HERE.
More on “QUARANZINE” from the band:
“This zine was created in the first few weeks of our mandatory quarantine. It was printed and ready to ship before the full impact of COVID-19 was felt across the world and before the senseless deaths of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and Breonna Taylor (to name but a few) further exposed the foundational white supremacy and structural inequality at the heart of American, Canadian, and other capitalist societies. We are grateful for the voices and perspectives of marginalized peoples that continue to play a central role in this worldwide awakening and in the sustained call to dismantle racist and patriarchal structures that have perpetrated violence in our communities. We stand in solidarity with all those trying to envision safer and more just communities and will continue to do our daily best in amplifying and uplifting these voices as we move forward in the world.
With that in mind, we hope you’ll view this thing for what it is: a time capsule. It is the four members of PUP, bored as fuck, fresh off a cancelled tour, trying to create something as silly as possible because, at the time, we wanted a distraction. Although it doesn’t necessarily represent our current emotional states, we had a good laugh making it and had a good laugh revisiting it all these months later. Honestly, that’s why we started making these zines in the first place. If you buy this thing, we hope it helps you find a bit of levity in what has been an incredibly bleak few months.
BLM / ACAB / WEAR A MASK.
And please, take care of each other. See ya in the pit when this thing’s all over.
xoxo
Stefan, Steve, Nestor and Zack”
WATCH AND SHARE “ANAPHYLAXIS” HERE
BUY / STREAM “ANAPHYLAXIS” HERE
In 2019, PUP released the massive album Morbid Stuff last year to critical acclaim, earning countless year-end nods, their late-night debut on Late Night With Seth Meyers, and a largely sold-out world tour that had them on the road for a solid 9 months. As 2020 got going, PUP released the video for “Anaphylaxis,” their first new material since Morbid Stuff’s release. You can watch the claymation video for “Anaphylaxis,” directed by Callum Scott-Dyson, HERE as well as a quarantine-induced performance of the track HERE. Recently, the band released Live at The Electric Ballroom on Bandcamp for one day only, with 50% of the proceeds, totalling $27,504.82, going to Critical Resistance and Breakaway Addiction Services in Toronto.
About Morbid Stuff:
Formed in Toronto five years ago, PUP, comprised of Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski, quickly became favourites 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.
STREAM / BUY MORBID STUFF HERE
MORE PRAISE FOR MORBID STUFF
"Morbid Stuff [is] another collection of explosively catchy anthem/tantrums...[PUP] still sound about as vibrant and youthful as a rock band can. It’s invigorating. It’s harrowing. It rules. Fuck with it." - Stereogum
"These guys are heroes." - NPR Music's Robin Hilton
"Along with the band’s songwriting, Babcock’s point of view has sharpened further and grown even more candid, grappling with his own depression and repurposing the band’s most crippling doubts into addictive hooks." - Vulture
"With 'Morbid Stuff,' the Toronto band made the best album of their career." - Noisey
""PUP’s third album Morbid Stuff is by far their best yet, and already one of the best punk albums of the year." - Brooklyn Vegan
"The beauty of PUP is that the band writes confident, catchy punk songs that are fueled, almost exclusively, by anxiety and indecision. On ['Morbid Stuff'], PUP offers up a new batch of songs that all play like stadium-punk anthems, but Stefan Babcock is still singing about every stupid thing he’s ever said or done. " - The A.V. Club