Cola Make Modern Alienation Sound Radically Original on ‘Cost of Living Adjustment’

When the catchiest tune on a rock record is called “Conflagration Mindset,” you know this is a band that’s not going to give you any happy endings. Especially when the band is Cola. These guys have made their name in recent years as a radically original Canadian art-punk trio, but they take a giant leap forward with their excellent third album, Cost of Living Adjustment. You want dystopian guitar grooves exploring all the ways that the capitalist grind corrodes your hopes, your dreams, your very soul? You’ve come to the right place.

Guitarist/singer Tim Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworthy rose from the ashes of their previous band, the much-loved Montreal art-punk outfit Ought, with an expansive new sound, teaming up with drummer Evan Cartwright. They explored modern alienation on two solid albums, 2022’s Deep In View and 2024’s The Gloss. But this time they go all the way, for their toughest, slinkiest, and best songs ever.

Cola have definitely gotten more aggressive and confident — where these guys used to insinuate, now they’re willing to go for the throat. Darcy has been one of the most inventive singers in indie rock over the past decade-plus, going back to Ought’s early days, but here he tries out a trick that’s relatively rare for him: singing actual melodies. Hey — it turns out he’s great at it. Who knew?

The band jumps right out at you in the irresistible “Hedgesplitting.” It’s got a sampled hip-hop drum loop, side by side with the very-human drummer rocking out, with shoegaze guitar/synth shimmer that sounds strung out somewhere between Ride and the Cure. Darcy sings about the “split vision” of growing up to be an adult you don’t recognize — or like — in the light of your teenage dreams, asking, “Back to beginnings? Was it ever not this way?”

Cola have the revitalized sense of purpose you’d expect from their kinda-sorta self-titled album. They originally took the band name from the acronym C.O.L.A., measuring the ever-increasing price of getting by in a capitalist society, day by day. Yet it also makes a witty connection between politics and soda pop, a product they described on their debut album as “a beverage bound by laws older than man to poison most ordinary life on earth.” “There’s this lyric on the record about soda,” Darcy told Rolling Stone in 2022. “But it feels like there is some symbiotic relationship between a ‘Cost of Living Adjustment’ and some of the political overtones in the record.”

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Tim Darcy has always been the man of a thousand voices — a wildly imaginative singer playing different roles, capturing the disintegration of the self from different angles. Over the years he’s excelled as a madman preacher, a punk firebrand, a con man, a desperate supplicant, in vocals that can evoke heroes from David Byrne (“Landers”) to the Fall’s Mark E. Smith (“Beautiful Blue Sky”). But his voice changes from song to song, to suit the story he’s telling, with his acerbic humor and oblique poetics. 

For the fantastic finale “Skywriter’s Sigh,” he adopts a Morrissey-style voice that has to be intentional, while his guitar does a skewed version of Johnny Marr’s indie jangle. It’s the best early Smiths song you’ve heard in a while. (It’s a change to hear a left-wing Morrissey — it reminds you how for so many years, Morrissey was the left-wing Morrissey.) But the vocals really sting. “I took out a loan to watch the night sky/I needed inspiration from the inverse of what I knew,” Darcy sings, adding the Smiths-worthy proverb, “A celestial event is worth a season of rent.”
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The music is all forward motion, with plenty of the Krautrock motorik beat driving these songs. The rhythm section plays duck-and-dodge with the post-punk guitar, building up the tension. You might hear Gang of Four or Mission of Burma in the grooves. But for a band that distrusts pop blandishments, Cola have gotten a lot less coy about going for choruses that grab you and melodies that stick. “Much of a Muchness” slams home over Darcy’s wordplay, as he dissects societal dysfunction. “Let’s get down to work, someone has to do it,” he sneers. “It’s all eros and ones/All digits, no thumbs.” 
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“Favoured by the Ride” sounds like a seductively strange mix of Fugazi and INXS, while “Satre-torial” is a song as quizzical as its title. (A fashion satire, mashed up with French existentialism?) But it cleverly dissects the winner-take-all consumerist mindset, with the hook, “When you get it, it’s never enough/That said, I will take it.” But the high point is “Conflagration Mindset,” a disarmingly beautiful tune with a haunting sense of dread. Like so many other people, Darcy lost his home last year when it was destroyed in the L.A. fires. He evokes that loss here, with imagery about drinking beer from a hotel cup. When he asks, ”Is there some way to save the records,” it’s a multi-faceted question. Cola don’t offer any easy answers here — that’s not their style. But it’s an album full of dynamic passion and determination, from a band to keep following.