Pup release new single "Matilda" - new album in April

Pup announced their 4th studio record “The Unraveling Of Puptheband” yesterday. It will be released April 1st via Little Dipper – Rise Records/BMG. The band also shared their new single “Matilda”.

The story behind the song “Matilda” is a personal one for Stefan – a love song to the guitar he used to start the band.

The song’s music video tells a similar story, guest-starring actor/comedian Mike Mitchell (Netflix series Love, The Tomorrow War, Doughboys podcast).

Stefan about the song:

“Matilda is the name of my favorite guitar. It was a gift from my friend Ryan after he saw me accidentally break the only guitar I owned in the middle of a long tour. I didn’t have money to buy a spare guitar and Ryan’s kindness is at the top of my list of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. I played Matilda non-stop at every PUP show for 7 years, even when my bandmates started complaining that she sounded shit. As the band grew, the pressure to sound better grew, so I bought a “good” guitar and played Matilda less and less. Before I knew it, I hadn’t played it in over a year. I wrote this song because of this intense feeling of guilt and sadness and shame and nostalgia and regret seeing her rotting in a corner. I love this guitar and I love Ryan and I wanted to please them and I felt like I had failed them both. I convinced the band that Matilda deserved one last appearance on a PUP record and I played her during the bridge of this song. It sounds so crappy. But good shit. Big shit. For me, that was the most joyful and cathartic moment of the entire making of this record. “

PUP – consisting of Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski – have announced their ambitious and aptly titled fourth album, “THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND”, out April 1st. “THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND” was recorded and mixed in five weeks in the summer of 2021 at GRAMMY Award-winner Peter Katis’ bat-filled Connecticut mansion. Full of typically angry, ridiculous, and anthemic songs, the recording process allowed PUP to evolve further than ever before. With more time in the studio, they were able to shape their songs in ways they hadn’t been able to in the past and were able to incorporate new instruments like piano, synths, horns, and more for the first time. Although created in insane isolation (apart from Peter and the Bats, of course), they were joined on the album by Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah, NOBRO’s Kathryn, Casper Skulls’ Mel, and Remo Drive’s Erik. The result is not just the next batch of PUPs, but the *most* batch of PUPs.

PUP had already released “Waiting“, which will also appear on “THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND” when they announced their upcoming tour a few weeks ago (which will include performances at the Coachella & Shaky Knees Festival). “Robot Writes A Love Song” followed as the second song from the album. Written in 15 minutes and recorded with vocals in the back seat of Stefan’s car, “Robot Writes A Love Song” dissolves into a torrent of nervous vocals before becoming arguably the most emotional song ever written from a computer perspective, who is overcome to the point of death by real human emotions. The brilliant music video was directed by Whitey McConnaughy.

In 2019, PUP released the album “Morbid Stuff” to critical acclaim including Pitchfork and NPR, their late-night debut on Late Night With Seth Meyers, the JUNO Award for Alternative Album of the Year, being shortlisted for Polaris Music Prize and sold-out concerts all over the world followed. Two years later, in the summer of 2021, they spent a few weeks in a Connecticut mansion with Peter Katis (Interpol, Kurt Vile, The National) to record and mix their new album THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND.

The band – Babcock, bassist Nestor Chumak, drummer Zack Mykula, and guitarist Steve Sladkowski – pretty much never left. As the band settled into their new home, the (figurative) walls came down.

“As the weeks went by, we seemed less and less rational, objective and reasonable,” says Babcock. “You can hear the band starting to fall off a cliff and that’s why I think this album is our most truthful and honest yet. There’s nothing more PUP like a slow and inescapable descent into self-destruction.”

Every PUP album comes with an implicit “contents under pressure” warning; the tension between the band’s instinct for the melodic and their gift for chaos drives the songs forward while leaving them on the verge of being in a horrific spray of tears and gore flying apart. THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is the sound of a band that’s not only comfortable with this chaos but masters it. “There’s only so many times you can write a song about how much you hate yourself before you write a song about how damn good you are at hating yourself,” says Babcock. “I wanted to write about the horrible state of the world, but through a very specific and personal lens. I’m trying to find my own way of dealing with existential anxiety,

THE UNRAVELING isn’t really a departure from what PUP brought here; despite the new breadth, this is still the band’s fourth album to turn songs about the Bad Decisions lifestyle into scratchy art. The hooks are as bright and unruly as ever, the venom that runs through each song is no less potent. But a fourth album should be different than the first, or even the third, and THE UNRAVELING is.

“I don’t know if we set out to do new stuff,” Mykula says of an album that sees the band doing a lot of new stuff. “It’s just a band trying to sound like how they feel about themselves. With every record you make, you get closer to that.”

THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is that next step – not towards perfection, or even towards a more perfect version of writing songs about failure, but simply towards the direction he has chosen. It’s a product of that endlessly awful, broader moment, but also a step forward into that uncertainty.

“The whole process of the album really brought us closer together, even as things unraveled,” says Babcock. “It’s hands down my favorite PUP album and I don’t think it could have come about under any other circumstances.”