“I feel like there’s just this constituent of pop music that makes it really timeless and, by design, designed to be something that infects your brain and lingers,” Choy says of “The Medium.” “And so to be reaching toward that lineage, like the whole institution of pop music, was for us sincerely a sort of homage to it, but also in a more cynical way.” 

The sound of Red Mile procedurally features the band’s typical unrestrained, enigmatic art-punk aesthetic. Built on top of Choy’s barking vocals and packed to the brim with ‘80s new wave motifs is a musical scattershot of rock operas, post-punk noodling, and power ballads.

Although filled with often long, lyrically dense songs, Red Mile’s composition, at least to Choy, is more restrained, stripped back, and pared down compared to their previous releases. Conducting the record in this manner, he says, “felt truer to some of the ambivalence that we were feeling in our own lives,” mentioning that the band were “using that as a liberating mechanism by way of minimalism.” 

Red Mile may be Crack Cloud’s most roving record, but it never strays too far from the central idea of creative identity. “Living an artistic life isn’t really for the faint of heart because you’re positioning yourself in a way where you’re deliberately overthinking, romanticizing, enhancing, and dramatizing things,” concedes Choy. “And that’s not always conducive to a healthy mode of living.”

Choy worries that the “liminal space of abstraction” of touring, recording, and writing songs can lead to a strange form of arrested development for the collective. “Because we’re moving so fast, the climax to that was really coming back down to earth and grounding ourselves with family and loved ones and just getting reoriented with who we are and who we’ve become,” he says. 

Red Mile’s penultimate track, “Ballad of Billy,” wrestles with some of these ideas and may well be the emotional thesis statement of the record. Written by Choy’s younger brother Will, the song tells the tale of a self-deprecating, despondent youth hopelessly meandering through life, searching for a way to reorientate themselves. “I’m a piece of shit, I’m a hypocrite / Oh buddy, don’t I know / What I take from you I give to me / I’m a burden just to know,” surrenders the song’s character. “But I’ll change,” he promises in the track’s final lines. 

“I think that my relationship to that song, the whole essence of it, is just my connection to [Will],” reflects Choy. “Witnessing his development over the years and seeing him rise to the occasion, be vulnerable, and really allow himself to use the platform for him to unravel was, I think, a really important thing in our relationship.”

Crack Cloud’s latest album is their most inward-looking. It examines their growth, success, and the accompanying prongs of stress and tension with the granularity of a magnifying glass. For the group who sees that one cannot exist without the other, the weight of it all is lifted through the solace of communal creativity. As they sing on “The Medium,” “When feeling low / You go out to a show and you sing along / It’s somewhere to belong.”