The 10-track album and follow-up to 2020's debut Pain Olympics, will be out on September 16 via Meat Machine. Pre-order your copy here.
Tough Baby is both a clarion call and a life-manual for the listener. Witness the opening track ‘Danny’s Message’, which has two key lines, seemingly recorded on a dictaphone. One is an entreaty: “I hope you guys can learn a lot from what I’m trying to tell you.” The other, a command: “Music is an excellent way to let your anger out, put it all on paper.” The voice is that of Danny Choy, the father of Zach. Danny was fatally diagnosed with Leukaemia at 29. Zach explains: “Before he passed, he left behind a wealth of poems, song transcriptions, carvings and audio journals for my family to remember him by.” Zach is now 29. Appropriately Danny’s influence, still “all-encompassing” twenty years later, launches Tough Baby.
Unsurprisingly, Tough Baby is a record with purpose and resolve. Nothing is wasted. Sometimes the music feels deliberately compressed, the essences extracted and bottled into an overpowering cordial, as on ‘115 At Night’, which sounds like an ‘80s Van Halen track being squeezed into another shape. And it’s difficult to see how a track like ‘Virtuous Industry’ can hold itself together, such are the sonic hoops it jumps through. The sharp angles and hook-laden guitar lines that were once seen as a trademark sound are less in evidence. Last track ‘Crackin Up’ does nod back to earlier releases with a booming beat and guitars that snag, like wool on barbed wire.
Tough Baby contains music to think to, music with which to educate, agitate and organise. Zach says, “the name Tough Baby is an allusion to our Planet. To our Culture. And to our Selves.” It’s made to remind us that whilst we are all in the gutter to some extent, some of us are looking at the kerb.
Word of the album comes alongside its lead single 'Please Yourself' - a transcendent epic in true Crack Cloud fashion that's equal parts muscle and sinew, and yet not afraid to switch into a strung-out piano doodle midway through. It's accompanied by a video that leans into the central mantra under which the Crack Cloud crew operate: utilising art and creativity as a vehicle for healing, discovery and understanding. As frontman, drummer and lyricist Zach Choy explains:
"As a kid, my bedroom was an altar. The images on the wall represented much of what I idolized and aspired to be. This sort of deification of pop culture helped to reinforce my sense of self narrative, however fabricated. But it also provided a sense of solidarity... with a subculture that validated insecurities in a personable way. This is what makes the media industry such a profound paradox. It is both a source of inspiration for people, as it is an engineered illusion."
"Art is a mechanism for healing and discovery. You learn through it, and you grow with it. In our culture we’re predisposed to quantifying art, to sanctioning it, and to manufacturing it. But underneath all of that, it is a form of living inquiry; it’s how we learn to unravel the extremities in life so that we may better understand ourselves,
and each other. "
Check out the album's tracklist and watch the the video for "Please Yourself" below.
Tough Baby Tracklist:
1. Danny's Message
2. The Politician
3. Costly Engineered Illusion
4. Please Yourself
5. Virtuous Industry
6. Tough Baby
7. Criminal
8. 115 At Night
9. Afterthought (Sukhi's Prayer)
10. Crackin Up
