Bad Waitress Return With New Single “Lovin’ Kind”

Toronto punk quartet Bad Waitress have returned with Lovin’ Kind, the first advance single from their new album, In The Hollow, that will be released on October 30th via Stomp Records. Landing alongside a new video and the launch of digital and physical pre-orders, the single is the first taste of the band’s first full-length in five years: a self-produced record that takes their already volatile punk somewhere darker, stranger and more inward. Bad Waitress have always sounded a little dangerous around the edges. There’s L7 and Babes In Toyland in the abrasion, the nervous art-punk electricity of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and some of the heavier post-punk pull of METZ and Fugazi, but the collision has always belonged to them. Kali-Ann Butala, Katelyn Molgard, Moon and Nicole Cain make punk that can feel playful one second and vaguely threatening the next, guitars scraping against a punishing rhythm section while Butala moves between melody, sneer and something closer to a warning.

Recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto and produced by Bad Waitress themselves, the song takes a love-song premise and immediately makes it suspicious. attraction tangles with resentment, vulnerability and the instinct to push someone away. By the time the chorus lands, it sounds less like a confession than fair warning. The song keeps doubling back on itself. Come closer. Don’t get too close. Tear me up. Take everything. There’s something funny about the extremity of it, but something uncomfortable underneath too. Lovin’ Kind never really settles whether this is romance, self-sabotage or two people knowingly walking into the same terrible idea. Bad Waitress seem perfectly happy leaving it unresolved.