“For the last bunch of years, I’ve been just always on the move,” Evan Cartwright says.
The drummer for the post-punk trio Cola, Cartwright is in Victoria, B.C., for his sister’s wedding when he joins his bandmates for a video call with The Grind. Over the last three years, he’s lived mainly between Toronto and New York, where he’s studying composition.
“If we were out on the road and we met someone who’d ask ‘where are you guys from?’ or ‘where do you live?’ I would have heart palpitations,” Cartwright says. “I was bouncing around so much that I didn’t have a clear answer for anybody.”
His bandmates can relate.
In recent years, Cola singer and guitarist Tim Darcy has split his time between Toronto, Los Angeles, and Montreal, where he and the band’s bassist Ben Stidworthy (both former members of Ought) currently reside. “We all live itinerant lives,” Darcy says.
Formed following the dissolution of Ought, Cola’s first two albums were filled with wiry atmospheric post-punk that channeled anxiety into hypnotic grooves. The band’s third album, Cost of Living Adjustment (C.O.L.A.), released May 8 via Fire Talk, is pervaded by a sense of drift and dislocation.
For Darcy, those themes became painfully concrete in January 2025, when the deadly Eaton Fire tore through Los Angeles’s Altadena neighbourhood, destroying the home he shared with his partner.
“Over the course of an hour, we lost everything,” Darcy says.
The experience became central to the emotional atmosphere of the album. “Conflagration Mindset,” which the band describes as “a north star” during the album’s writing process, retraces the diners, hotels, and temporary spaces Darcy and his partner passed through while fleeing the flames. Built from one of Cartwright’s demos — a whirring, synth-driven sketch Darcy calls “almost Burial-like” — it conjures an eerie sense of removal and instability.
“It was just four chords, but ones that don’t settle,” Cartwright explains. “They flip back and forth so frequently that you don’t get to rest on one.”
Across the 11 tracks on C.O.L.A., homes and domestic spaces are sites of class immobility and anxiety, places haunted by aspirational archetypes. The album’s title nods to the affordability and inflation crisis in Canada, and many of its songs linger in the strange and emotional terrain produced by precarity.
On “Fainting Spells,” Darcy rearranges his mind’s furniture as he assesses apartment listings over a mundane rhythmic swirl. On “Polished Knives,” homemaking rituals go hand-in-hand with the circular pursuit of middle-class existence in the hollow of an ever-inflating economy. “I polish flatware like it’s money / Saving up for a year of someday,” Darcy sings. “Third Double” transforms a malfunctioning Roomba crashing into walls and tumbling down staircases into a metaphor for the depressive pleasure-seeking of playing a losing game.
“When you enter (a space of) liminality, of being between things, it changes your way of thinking,” Darcy suggests. “It’s a way to get out of the habituations of capitalism and the society we live in, and helps you think about potentialities that maybe feel far off right now.”
On lead single “Hedgesitting,” Darcy’s lyrics bounce between past- and present-tense over a hybrid breakbeat built over programmed drums prepared by Stidworthy, doubled with an acoustic drumbeat from Cartwright. The kit work combines a machinic rhythm with a tangible sense of humanity, creating a beat evoking ’80s-’90s Madchester and Britpop exports like the Stone Roses and early Blur, linking the song to that brief era of reignited utopian thinking and psychedelic emboldenment unabashedly borrowed from the ’60s.
“[That era] did have this really optimistic air,” Stidworthy says, “but then it was also built on the back of New Labour, which just ended up being a complete disaster for the U.K.”
“When you were young, you came to make it,” Darcy sings, conjuring memories of youthful optimism; of hopes dashed by the arrival of the 2008 financial crisis. “When you were young, didn’t have a phone.”
And on “Forced Position,” Darcy situates wildfires within the context of disaster capitalism, climate catastrophe, and the Paris Agreement’s seemingly doomed premise of meaningfully capping emissions by 2030.
Donald Trump announced a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement the same month of the Eaton Fire. It officially withdrew from the climate accord in January.
“Guess Paris is burning,” Darcy sings. The statement feels central to the album’s focus on overlapping material and spiritual crises.
For Darcy and the rest of Cola, the only way to respond to these overlapping crises and the nihilism of black pill politics is to forge a new path forward, to inhabit irony, sincerity, despair, and hope simultaneously.
“That might sound utopian,” Darcy says. “But to contemplate that kind of reality right next to our own can be very potent.”
This article appeared in the 2026 Jun/Jul issue.