Canadian Post-Punks Cola Get Refreshingly Alienated On 'Glass'

“I have some questions/Deposited with displeasure,” Cola singer-guitarist Tim Darcy informs us on the Montreal post-punk band's second album. Cola has its own fun little take on modern alienation. Layering bright guitars over stretched, languid, minimalist drums and bass, their sound brings to mind Wire and the earliest Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen. However, where these bands were set in the decaying post-industrial England of the 1970s, Cola are products of our own more dehumanized atmospheric times. “I'm a scented kind of shadow,” sings Darcy The glass, the band's second album. His shadow world contains multitudes.

Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworth joined the excellent extended band Ought in the mid-2010s. On Cola, they are joined by drummer Evan Cartwright (who has played with US Girls and the Weather Station) and made a superb debut in 2022 with Deep in View. Cola's name evokes a mainstream consumer product, but it was actually inspired by something even more common: the Cost of Living Adjustment, a statistic used by government bureaucrats to calculate changes in benefit payments relative to inflation. Indeed, there's something almost technocratically precise about the crisp, caustic attack of songs like “Albatross” and “Pallor Tricks.” But Cola are by no means fun-hating misogynists. Guitars up The glass they can be sleek and tough, but they're often kind of beautiful and even a little edgy. The rhythms are sharp and skeletal, but also propulsive and jumpy. Darcy's singing can sometimes bring to mind the stentorian pronouncements of the Fall's Mark E. Smith, but there's also a strain of depressing hot-guy brio in his voice that a Strokes fan might recognize. You'll find yourself pulling your head more often than you think you would with such a low-profile band.

Darcy spends the album trying to purchase what Ought/Cola progenitor Pere Ubu once called “the empty spaces in this life,” out of technological malaise (“I woke up lazy, the tele turned on/Variable Wavelength got me ready, ” he sings on “Bell Wheel”) in fleeting moments of interpersonal weirdness (“You sure put together an honest lie/The sweet kind of reporting,” he tells someone on “Pulling Quotes”). On “Down to Size,” he wanders a city cityscape that's changing so fast he can't keep up, while “Reprise” frowns at the landscape of twenty-something rulelessness (“a career in fashion, think school”).

But Cola is too wrapped up in her own elegant, long guitar racket to wallow in apathy or frustration, and Darcy has a wry, introspective attitude towards his own opaque underbelly. “The jokes don't come off right, but the point is true,” he murmurs against the spartan drift of “Nice Try.” Cola has its own unique way of turning their empty spaces into seas of possibilities.