Meet Cola — a band for right now, rising from the ashes of Ought, specializing in guitar-driven tales of modern life and high-tech alienation.
They wrote these songs in the most early-2020s way possible — sending each other long-distance demos, from separate cities, and trying to fill in the communication gaps the best they could. “After Ought, Tim and I were lying low for a while, figuring out our next steps, writing music independently,” Stidworthy says. “Tim was living in Toronto and I was living in Montreal. Then at some point in the fall of 2019, we got on the phone and decided we wanted to write together.
Once a month or so, the three musicians would meet to continue their work in person in Toronto or Montreal. Soon they had a set of songs full of nimble post-punk grooves and jagged guitar blurts, often in eerie open tunings. Darcy takes on topics like consumerist malaise, the loneliness of compulsive scrolling, and the constant threat of war. As he sings in his sardonic deadpan voice, “Peace will come/Peace will come out in the wash.
Ought fans will find plenty to love, but as far as Cola are concerned, this is a whole new band. “At no point did we conceive of this as the post-Ought project,” Darcy says. “It wasn’t how we were thinking about it in a narrative sense, and it also wasn’t what we were interested in. The band breaking up was sad because it was a beautiful time and a great project, but what Ben and I were tip-toeing into when we started writing together again was these new creative challenges.