With SO TIRED, Armstrong is summiting to a peak of self-realization. From picking up a bass as a teen and making her boyfriend teach her, to coming up in band after band as the Toronto scene slowly inched its way out of being just dudes shredding, the solo project is the first thing that’s felt truly her own.

“I’d started as one of the girls on the couches in the garages, watching guys play,” says Armstrong. “But it was like, I don’t want to just sit here and listen to them play.”

She remembers how guys around her in the scene at the time, gatekept their command of their instruments – held it close to their chests, brushing it off as too technical. She would be the pretty face shoved forward to ask if her band could crash at someone’s house on tour. As she’s seen the face of the Toronto scene change around her, she feels she’s in great company to step into her own. 

It adds a layer of reclamation that the name of the project was chosen by her ex-partner. Now that she has full custody of the moniker with all the freedom in the world to change it, she actually felt better keeping it. While it may have originated from a man thinking of a Fugazi song, Armstrong’s way of seeing it is as a rallying cry for the fed-up.

SO TIRED lends a cathartic snarl to anyone wronged by misogyny, racism, or clawing at the foot of any other systems of oppression. The upcoming debut album, DROP ME boils over with anti-patriarchal rage like a screaming kettle. Born between nonstop city life and Armstrong’s parents’ quiet place in the country surrounded by tobacco fields, it’s a go-primal-scream-in-a-field type beat. I asked her if she ever had. 

“No, but I’d love to – I’m too afraid someone would hear and be like oh my god, there’s a murder happening,” says Armstrong, kind eyes lighting up. “I just wouldn’t be able to fully release in the way I’d want to.”

She says the only place she can get that kind of full-bodied release is belting in her car, or obviously, on stage. Armstrong says it even got to a point back in the day where she realized she was leaning on performances too much as her sole emotional outlet. She’s since learned to tap into other ways of coping.

“I had a lot of pent-up anger without a good outlet. I know a lot of women and femmes, we’re not very supported in expressing that,” says Armstrong. “It makes men uncomfortable.”

DROP ME sees Armstrong step into lyric-writing fully to exorcise that as she never had before. It’s what she says she’s most proud of in this debut record – her own voice being realized on every level. On the track “Blind Faith,” it feels like she’s uttering a prayer, or in a confession booth, words spilling out fast and hot.

Sonically, Armstrong was leaning on her post-punk and hardcore roots as usual. But DROP ME sounds distinct from the 2019 EP, thanks to an electronic road she was wandering down at the time. She was playing around with programming drum beats – a lot of making things go beep-boop-beep.

“It was a fight to make it work, because so often people would weigh in and say, ‘you actually don’t need to have these beats in there’,” says Armstrong. “But I was like no, it’s important to me to keep them. They tickle my brain in such a nice way.”

Now, when she listens back to the tracks, or preps them for a show, she knows she made the right call. That’s what’s at the core of this new record – that glimmering, near-religious feeling of confirmation you get when you abide by your gut, and the proudness of putting it on display for all to hear. 

SO TIRED’s album release show takes place October 1, as part of Project Nowhere, presented by RANGE.