The Unraveling of PUPTheBand
| PUP
The Unraveling of PUPTheBand
The Unraveling of PUPTheBand is the fourth album by Canadian punk rock band PUP, released on April 1, 2022, through Rise Records and Little Dipper, the band's personal label.The album will be accompanied by the Canadian, American, and European tour PUP Returns. The album's cover artwork was illustrated by Jordan Speer. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
The Toronto band returns with a supremely hooky, slightly more polished album about harnessing dread to make music to harness dread to.
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Sputnik Music
Unraveling’s hallucinogenic hallmarks need refinement, yet what they spell for PUPTHEBAND Inc.’s intentions leaves me beaming like an idiot. They aren't done with us yet, still able and willing to cake the wall with new shit until something sticks or the whole damn building caves in, whichever is sooner. Their quest to find the next ying-yang worth raving about is one I’ll gladly join them on. When the results are as fun as The Unraveling of PUPTheBand., it’s rather hard to turn them down.
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The Line of Best Fit
THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is a slight miscalculation but a worthy addition to PUP’s catalogue.
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Get Alternative
It’s an album that both fits comfortably alongside the group’s previous records while also sounding not quite like anything they have ever done. It’s as if the group could not help but throw all of these ideas into the record; both challenging and catchy, it’s PUP’s riskiest move yet and the results are fantastic.
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Kerrang!
It’s honestly starting to seem like an art / How we keep tearing ourselves apart,’ Stefan cries, but whereas earlier that would have seemed a backhanded compliment, by this stage of the record it’s clear that PUP have overthrown all the insecurities that resulted in its making. As is final track, PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy, a fake swansong that reasserts PUP’s creativity, originality and passionate intensity while decrying the band for lacking all three. It’s perhaps something only they could pull off, but pulled it off PUP absolutely have, and with raw, emotional vulnerability to boot.
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The Collegian
The record as a whole is creatively different and seems to escape the genre a little more than what they have done in the past. It is less restrained, more chaotic and louder — in a good way.
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Treblezine
It’s a collection of mostly good songs alongside a couple of great ones. Unfortunately, it suffers from a kind of directionlessness that prevents it from graduating very far beyond that middle ground. But then, PUP have a penchant for meta-self-commentary. Who’s to say that’s not intentional?
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AllMusic
Biting the hand that feeds is one of punk's great traditions, and it's a relief to find Pup's shambling spirit unsullied by their present status.
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New Noise Magazine
While this isn’t my favorite PUP album, it’s still a great listen. It’s angry, edgy, chaotic, and at times, calming in a strange way. If you’re a fan of PUP, you’re sure to enjoy THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND. It’s definitely worth listening to.
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Stereoboard
With buckets of character on display, a refined balance of scrappiness and grace and no song that sounds too similar to the ones before or after, the Torontonians have made their case for why they’ve made it this far. Their path is only going up from here.
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Stack
Brash, debauched, and screaming towards a cliff that you can’t quite bring yourself to pull back from, The Unraveling of PUPTheBand stands tall above previous work as their most unflinching and engaging record to date.
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Peanut Butter Pope
I’ll offer no such judgement; even if the committed themes of UNRAVELING overperform like an off-the-rails stage play, the burning, acid rain-like downpour that commences is palpably shiver-inducing. All I can say is that I hope that this in-band turmoil doesn’t coincide with a genuine PUP implosion, but even so, bottling that implosion was a damn good idea.
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Stereogum
The concept of a band evolving from a fun hobby to a grueling job to an unbearable albatross is not unique; on the other hand, if you’re not in a band, it’s not especially relatable. But PUP are experts at invigorating tired tropes, and they’re even better at mining out painfully familiar sensations from their own experience, so that anyone who’s ever been embittered or distressed can find catharsis by becoming one with the gang vocal. They’re so good at this stuff, in fact, that they’ve built something close to a sustainable career in an industry every bit as volatile as their music.
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Paste Magazine
THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND Pairs Consistent Songwriting with Confounding Production.
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NME
This self-reflexive fourth album finds the quartet grappling with fame, fortune and their own inclinations to fuck it all up. File under: loveably dysfunctional.
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DIY Magazine
It might still play to their self-deprecating strengths, but it also proves that they’re secretly ambitious too.
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The Mic Magazine
Beyond just feeling like classic PUP (which is something I would have enthusiastically taken), this album dabbles skilfully in conflicting themes and broad instrumental influences, infusing the modern pop-punk landscape with skilful songwriting, mature and complex themes and maintaining PUP’s talent for having the best hooks in modern pop punk. It’s not perfect, but the cohesion of the album’s corporate theme is surprisingly decently done, and frankly, with songs as good as this, it barely needed it anyway.
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Spectrum Culture
It’s clear that the band is experimenting this time around, even attempting to construct a quasi-narrative framing PUP as a product to be sold, but the best of The Unraveling is reflected in their tried-and-true formula.
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Exclaim!
The band looked at a time when war, division and greed are in a bull market while hope, kindness and positivity are in the toilet, and they wrote a record that reflects that reality with all the nastiness they figure it deserves. If there's anything to be said about THE UNRAVELING, it's that PUP have remained true to themselves.
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Northern Transmissions
‘THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND’ – coming apart at the seams never sounded so good.
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I Am Tuned Up
If anything, the expanded sonic palette makes PUP sound more like themselves than they ever had, with all of the mood swings that tinted the records before now turned into full-fledged backdrops. The band hasn’t quite grown up as much as they’ve grown into a more imposing and more fully realized version of themselves. And for everyone who fell in love with their juvenile jabs and virally infectious riffs, that’s good news.
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