Teenage Punk Fantasies

Damian Abraham is pretty normal. “I'm at home in my house, I've put the kids to bed,” he says down the line from Toronto. “Actually my wife put the kids to bed but I was home for dinner; it is a very pleasant time before the tour starts.” Indeed, the punk-hardcore six-piece are about to hit the road to celebrate the release of their fourth record, Glass Boys. Given Abraham's known struggles with anxiety and his medical marijuana requirement, touring is something he has openly talked about cutting back on. But this isn't likely to happen too soon and definitely not before a visit Down Under. “Well thank God for Nimbin!” he says, laughing.

“I think at the end of the day it's still such an incredible opportunity – we get to play music. It's such a powerful feeling to actually be on stage and have people come watch what you're doing. We were normally forcing it upon people in the beginning.”

Glass Boys is shorter than the band's previous three records – 2006's Hidden World, 2008's The Chemistry Of Common Life and 2011's David Comes To Life – and is a tight and ambitious offering. Abraham has found more depth and range in his bark, a result of pre-production, something of a first-time experience for the band. “I think for me the vocals were always pushed to the very end [of recording],” he admits. “I'm proud of every record but I knew if I really tried I could do more and I could do different things with my voice and so this time around I said, 'We're going to take a long fucking time with vocals.'”

Abraham also had a number of guests lined up for the record including Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis and fellow Canadians The Tragically Hip's Gordon Downie and Alexisonfire's George Pettit, who all feature on the LP. “When I write a song, I tend to write it in someone else's voice. When it came time to record the record, I got really insecure about how that [guests] would look. Every song had a guest. I really tried to strip it back to just friends, people who I felt were coming from our world, people we've had relationships with or done stuff with.”

The lyrical content on Glass Boys was written by Abraham and guitarist Mike Haliechuk and addresses the realities and compromises the band have dealt with in order to live out the hardcore-punk fantasies they all dreamt about when they were teenagers. “I think it [lyrics] originally came about when we first started to write the record,” he explains. “We'd gone to this awards show here and I'd looked around at the people at the awards show and realised that everyone at this awards show were the very same people that when we started this band I despised and made up this Canadian industry which had no relationship to what I did or what I liked. It was a weird, eye-opening experience.” The band won the 2009 Polaris Prize, equivalent to our AMP, for the album, The Chemistry Of Common Life, and were nominated a second time in 2012.

But, rather than coming to terms with this feeling, Abraham says he and the band are still grappling with it. “I hope that we never accept it because that's not normal. Having people think about what they want to talk to you about in advance and then call you and talk to you and then write about what you say afterwards, that's not normal. These are awesome things and I think as soon as you start accepting these things as normal, it's going to start getting weird. The only reason I am able to make my living doing this is because people have granted me the opportunity.”