Interview: Crack Cloud

It is my opinion that Crack Cloud are currently the best band in the world. Or at least their new album ‘Pain

Olympics’ would suggest this. A shade under thirty minutes in length, its eight songs see the group transcend the angular strand of post-punk characteristic of their earlier work, and make use of the full spectrum of genre as the album metamorphoses from caustic art-punk to ethereal bliss. Interestingly for a band so deliberate in their movement and delivery of concept is the maturity and subtlety on display. Rather than political sloganeering or dogmatic absolutism, Crack Cloud present their message with the onus on the listener as an individual to take what they may.

With seven members forming the touring band within a wider collective of assorted friends and family, growing together as a group outside mainstream society - there is heavy emphasis on equality and inclusion, and offering a space and platform to those who may otherwise never find one. Idealistic but not naïve, fiercely intelligent yet not pretentious, principled but not domineering, Crack Cloud are not trying to save the world in grandiose terms, but rather pragmatically mobilise – both through their music and their ethos, to make life better for those willing to accept them.

Crack Cloud

by Lily Kong

We gave frontman Zach Choy a bell to talk the new album, emotional scar tissue becoming art, and the importance of context and community.

The album is completely unreal – could you talk me through some of the thematic and musical ideas informing the work?

The way we approached this album from the very beginning was just about abandoning all genre limitations, and all cultural limitations other than just writing off our instincts. We wanted to follow this path of turning an album into something that could be a bit more visual as storytellers – it’s our first effort in creating something on a linear scale, and the idea of creating an atmosphere, a world outside our own, is something we’ve always aspired to do. That was kind of the mood we wanted the album to create, as well as documenting the years it took to make it.

Was that conceptual nature something very deliberate then? It wasn’t something you sort of stumbled into?

Yeah, I think the concept was sort of a natural development, especially operating as a collective where you have so many different minds trying to celebrate the intersectionality of all these different ideas that cross, and trying to find that equilibrium when you have so many people contributing. Additionally, as someone who is for all intents and purposes a non musician, I find when writing music it’s a lot easier to do it in a way that’s visual, dynamic, and based on story arcs as opposed to some kind of musical structure. It’s about prioritising a story, and the music helping and filling it out.

In addition to being that ‘story’ you mention, something that really struck was its genre-spanning nature, incorporating everything from gangster rap to musical theatre. What inspired the need to try and work these elements in?

I think what you hear on the album is influence preceding what you hear on the first two EPs. I think post-punk as a genre is often brought up when Crack Cloud are brought up – and as someone who is kind of a non-musician, using art more as a medium for self-exploration and less than the following of trajectory of a traditional band, postpunk was an easy genre to find comfort within, because it’s so abstract and rhythm based. This album was really just a culmination of soaking it all in, getting better at articulating my thoughts. As a collective, every day we’re listening to something different, so the album is two years of music that we’ve digested and output as this narrative.

Something that really struck me was reading about you as ‘existing in the age of unlimited content’. What are your thoughts on this unfettered, constant access to content? Is it positive? And now the pandoras box of opportunity and anxiety is open, will it remain this way forever?

I think that everyone has their own emotional scar tissue, and I think that art is something from the dawn of time that has allowed us to explore that scar tissue. That there’s so much content I think is a testament to the many many people finding solace in an activity that allows them to explore and express themselves – I think it can be a tool we use to understand each other better. I think there

is probably something cynical in the oversaturation of content we can see, but I think it’s a blessing that we’re at a point in culture where despite all the terrible tribulations and general dissonance of our condition as humans, I think art is the one sliver of hope that we have in terms of unifying and finding solidarity in stories.

Read the full interview in Issue Twenty-Seven.

Words by Dan Pare.