TORONTO ART-PUNK PROVOCATEURS BAD WAITRESS ANNOUNCE NEW LP WITH FEROCIOUS FIRST SINGLE “LOVING KIND”
NEW ALBUM IN THE HOLLOW OUT OCTOBER 30 VIA STOMP RECORDS
Toronto punk quartet Bad Waitress return August 31 with “Loving Kind,” the first advance single from their new album In The Hollow, arriving October 30 via Stomp Records. Landing alongside a new video and the launch of digital and physical pre-orders, the single is the first taste of the band’s first full-length in five years: a self-produced record that takes their already volatile punk somewhere darker, stranger and more inward. Bad Waitress have always sounded a little dangerous around the edges. There’s L7 and Babes In Toyland in the abrasion, the nervous art-punk electricity of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and some of the heavier post-punk pull of METZ and Fugazi, but the collision has always belonged to them. Kali-Ann Butala, Katelyn Molgard, Moon and Nicole Cain make punk that can feel playful one second and vaguely threatening the next, guitars scraping against a punishing rhythm section while Butala moves between melody, sneer and something closer to a warning.
That tension was forged in Toronto’s punk underground, where Bad Waitress built their reputation in sweaty rooms with very little distance between band and audience. Since emerging with 2018’s Party Bangers: Volume 1 and pushing into heavier territory on 2021’s No Taste, they’ve carried that energy well beyond the city, sharing stages with Fucked Up, L7, Rise Against, Wolf Parade and The Bronx. Along the way, their jagged take on punk has earned comparisons to The Stooges, Fugazi and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with New Noise Magazine calling it an “all-out punk assault” and Exclaim! describing their evolution as “a new type of rage.”
“Loving Kind” picks up that volatility without simply retracing it. Recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto and produced by Bad Waitress themselves, the song takes a love-song premise and immediately makes it suspicious. “Tell you I love you / Then destroy you,” Butala sings, as attraction starts tangling with resentment, vulnerability and the instinct to push someone away. By the time the chorus lands on “I’m not the loving kind,” it sounds less like a confession than fair warning. The song keeps doubling back on itself. Come closer. Don’t get too close. Tear me up. Take everything. There’s something funny about the extremity of it, but something uncomfortable underneath too. “Loving Kind” never really settles whether this is romance, self-sabotage or two people knowingly walking into the same terrible idea. Bad Waitress seem perfectly happy leaving it unresolved.
That unease makes “Loving Kind” a fitting entrance to In The Hollow. The album grew out of the collective and personal isolation the band experienced over the past several years, with its members revisiting old memories and relationships from the uncomfortable vantage point of having changed themselves. Some of its imagery reaches much farther from Toronto, drawing on the Northwest Territories and Pacific Northwest, places members of the band grew up, where dark forests, vast wilderness and a sense of mysticism became a way of reflecting the isolation and uncertainty running through the songs. It gives In The Hollow a wider landscape, but the record’s concerns remain deeply personal. Across the album, Bad Waitress grapple with changing relationships, identity, sexuality and the strange experience of encountering earlier versions of yourself from a distance. Rather than treating transformation as some clean break with the past, the songs sit inside the messier part: figuring out what still belongs to you, what doesn’t, and what you’re finally ready to leave behind.
For a band whose music has always thrived on confrontation, there’s something fitting about turning some of that fight inward. Bad Waitress haven’t come back after five years sounding cleaner, calmer or particularly interested in resolution. They’ve simply found new places to put the unease. “Loving Kind” is the first taste: a love song with its guard up, its teeth showing, and one hand already reaching for the door.
Bad Waitress
In The Hollow
(Stomp Records)
Release Date: October 30, 2026
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Photo Credit: Calm Elliott-Armstrong
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