Bad Waitress Deliver New Album “In The Hollow”

Five years can leave a lot of ghosts behind. Toronto’s Bad Waitress have returned with In The Hollow, their new full-length album via Stomp Records, and a record built from the strange experience of meeting old relationships, old memories and old versions of yourself from somewhere further down the road. Self-produced and recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto, In The Hollow takes the volatile punk Bad Waitress built their name on and stretches it into something darker and more expansive: jagged art-punk, post-punk tension and garage-punk abrasion colliding with moments of eerie space and reflection. Made up of Kali-Ann Butala, Katelyn Molgard, Moon and Nicole Cain, Bad Waitress have never been particularly interested in keeping things tidy. Their music can be funny, furious, uncomfortable and strangely inviting all at once, with roots running through the confrontational punk of L7 and Babes In Toyland, the wiry art-school instincts of Wire and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the heavier noise-rock pull of METZ. In The Hollow keeps those instincts intact, but the world around them has changed.

The album grew out of several years of collective and personal isolation, when distance gave the four members time to reconsider relationships, identity and parts of themselves that once seemed fixed. Experiences around gender and sexuality surfaced alongside the creation and loss of important relationships, while old memories began looking different from the other side of change. Rather than turn those years into a record about despair, Bad Waitress became interested in what happens afterward: the uncomfortable work of letting go of what no longer serves you without knowing exactly what will replace it. Even the landscape around the songs began to shift. Some members of Bad Waitress grew up around the Northwest Territories and Pacific Northwest, and memories of those places found their way into the record as emotional scenery: dark forests, vast stretches of wilderness and a sense of mysticism far removed from the cramped Toronto rooms where the band first made its name. The imagery isn’t an escape from the album’s personal questions so much as a way of giving them somewhere to live. Isolation can mean being trapped inside a room, but it can also mean standing somewhere enormous and realizing just how small you are.