“Like Ought stripped of its excesses, polished down to something tactile and gleaming yet capable of a kind of perpetual motion.” So we wrote of Cola upon the release of their debut Deep in View back in 2022. The band, featuring ex-Ought members Tim Darcy (vocals/guitar) and Ben Stidworthy (bass) alongside drummer Evan Cartwright, might have risen from the ashes of the Montreal post-punk favourites, but it has become very much its own animal. One shaped by what Darcy calls a “tasteful minimalism,” an undoubtedly fitting label which carried through onto 2024 follow-up album The Gloss. But that record signalled further potential too. Some of Cartwright’s jazz-adjacent sensibilities shone through and suggested the possibility of a slightly different dimension to the project. A latent maximalism sitting in the background and waiting to fully emerge.
This spring sees Cola return with Cost of Living Adjustment (AKA C.O.L.A.), a quasi-self-titled album on Fire Talk Records which makes good on this promise. Because while this is evidently still the same band which so impressed us back in 2022, there’s been something of an evolution in intervening years. The sound pushed towards a higher form. Cola becoming itself in turn. Indeed, the play on the self-titled release is fitting, for C.O.L.A. is the release of a band at their most confident and inventive, as though, with the foundations laid, they are now able to really get to work. Both in terms of a more detailed, dare we say maximalist sound, and the thematic concerns it brings to life. “C.O.L.A. considers, among other things, socialism vs. hell,” the album notes read. “It considers: rolling the dice of life. The eerie and sweet pangs that nostalgia can provoke.”
Lead single ‘Hedgesitting’ is the perfect introduction to this new era for Cola. A song which matches a sample drum loop with real drums to up the rhythmic ante. One which veers between the sublime gloom of Disintegration and the infectious brightness of early 90s twee, with a dash of world-weary Protomartyr-esque social critique.
Watch the video directed by Kristina Pedersen below:
Cost of Living Adjustment will be released on the 8th May via Fire Talk Records and you can pre-order it now.
