Toronto art-punk provocateurs Bad Waitress return October 2 with “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk,” the second advance single from their new album In The Hollow, arriving October 30 . Following August’s ferocious first taste “Loving Kind,” the new single pushes further into the uncomfortable territory surrounding the record, turning intoxication, attraction and self-disgust into a bleary collision of jagged art-punk, garage-punk abrasion and wiry post-punk tension. There’s a nasty little contradiction sitting at the centre of “I Only Like You When I’m Drunk.” The title sounds like a joke you might regret making the next morning, but the song itself keeps digging beneath the punchline. “You horrify me / Make everything shit around me,” Kali-Ann Butala spits at the outset, only to admit moments later that she’s still drawn in. Desire becomes something embarrassing and invasive, the kind of attraction that seems to make less sense the closer you look at it.
Recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto and produced by Bad Waitress themselves, the song takes a love-song premise and immediately makes it suspicious. “Tell you I love you / Then destroy you,” Butala sings, as attraction starts tangling with resentment, vulnerability and the instinct to push someone away. By the time the chorus lands on “I’m not the lovin’ kind,” it sounds less like a confession than fair warning. The song keeps doubling back on itself. Come closer. Don’t get too close. Tear me up. Take everything. There’s something funny about the extremity of it, but something uncomfortable underneath too. “Loving Kind” never really settles whether this is romance, self-sabotage or two people knowingly walking into the same terrible idea. Bad Waitress seem perfectly happy leaving it unresolved.
