Bad Waitress return five years on with a love song that won’t let you get too close

Bad Waitress have spent the last five years going quiet in the way that tends to produce something worth waiting for. Since their 2021 full-length No Taste — which pushed their Toronto punk into denser, angrier territory — the four-piece have been largely off the radar: no singles, no tour cycle, just the slow accumulation of a record. Now they’re back. The first thing you hear is a love song. It’s just not a love song you’d trust.

“Lovin’ Kind” is the lead single from In The Hollow, the band’s forthcoming second full-length on Stomp Records. Self-produced and recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto, it arrives with a music video and the opening of pre-orders. The song takes a romantic premise and immediately makes it feel like a threat. “Tell you I love you / then destroy you,” sings Kali-Ann Butala, working through attraction, resentment, and the impulse toward self-destruction in under two and a half minutes. The band — Butala, Katelyn Molgard, Moon, and Nicole Cain — thread melody and menace in equal measure, guitars scraping against a punishing rhythm section. By the chorus, “I’m not the lovin’ kind” sounds less like an admission than a warning issued with full knowledge of what comes next.

In The Hollow, due October 30, emerged from a period of isolation that touched each member of the band differently. In the announcement, Bad Waitress describes revisiting old memories and relationships from the vantage point of having changed — encountering earlier versions of themselves from a distance. Some of the imagery draws on the Northwest Territories and the Pacific Northwest, places where members of the band grew up, where dark forests, vast wilderness, and a sense of austere mysticism gave them a language for the internal terrain the record maps. For a band whose music has always run on confrontation, there is something fitting about turning that same energy inward.

Bad Waitress built their name in Toronto’s punk underground, where the gap between band and audience tends to be measured in inches. Emerging with the Party Bangers: Volume 1 EP in 2018 and expanding into heavier territory on No Taste three years later, they have shared stages with Fucked Up, L7, Rise Against, Wolf Parade, and The Bronx, and earned comparisons to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, METZ, Fugazi, and Babes In Toyland. New Noise Magazine described their music as an “all-out punk assault”; Exclaim! tracked what they called “a new type of rage.” In The Hollow suggests the nature of that rage is still shifting.

“Lovin’ Kind” is out now on all platforms. In The Hollow arrives October 30 via Stomp Records; pre-orders and merchandise are available at linktr.ee/badwaitressband.

Tags: post-punk, art punk, Bad Waitress, In The Hollow, Kali-Ann Butala, Lovin’ Kind