When Chastity’s Brandon Williams first emerged out of the Southern Ontario DIY circuit in the mid-2010s in a torrent of whipped long black hair and blood-curdling rage, he appeared to be more interested in instant catharsis than conceptual vision. But just as Chastity has evolved beyond post-hardcore angst to embrace a Smashing Pumpkins-scaled grandeur, the Whitby, Ontario, artist has become a shepherd for disaffected suburban kids who can’t see a future beyond their cul-de-sacs. With Suffer Summer, he completes a master’s thesis in subdivision psychology that began with 2018’s Death Lust and 2019’s Home Made Satan, answering their respective ruminations on death and fear with a 10-song treatise on happiness. But that’s not to suggest the record ends the triptych on a cheery note—for Williams, happiness is less a desired end state than an ever-elusive white whale that’s often not worth the struggle required to capture it. “I’ve tried pills, I’ve tried church/Think I’d rather suffer,” he defiantly declares on the album opener. His outlook doesn’t turn more optimistic from there, even as he channels his melancholy into ecstatic surges of Mellon Collie. “Any happiness I've experienced in real life has been so brief—it's like five minutes long, typically,” Williams tells Apple Music. “So this record's about the struggle of coming to terms with that, and just being real about it from the first song to the last.” Here, Williams talks through the album, track by track.
“Real World” “On all these records, I think I'm doing my version of [Fucked Up’s] David Comes to Life: You can hear the author's voice and experience in the songs, but it’s all told through a character. And in 'Real World', this character I’ve made is ‘running face-first into hell on Earth'—and that's the real world that I've often experienced. So this is about being anxious and coming to terms with the reality that I'm probably not going to be happy.”
“Pummeling” “With this one, I had a sort of crossroads moment: I could make a song called 'Pummeling' that just pummels, or I could have these dark lyrics but make it hooky. The first line is ‘Life's a brutal shame/I'm up to my eyes in my usual misery.’ This was going to be the first song on this record, and I wanted to nod to 'Flames', the first song on my last record, where the first line is ‘Life is simple, life is plain/Fuck the future, stay the same'—and it's also a light-sounding song with dark lyrics. I’m just asking, 'We're trying to find happiness in a life like this?'”
“Dying to Live” “This song happened in the same hour as 'Pummeling'—like, right after it. You know how Kurt Cobain lifted [the title of] 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' from something Kathleen Hanna had spray-painted? For this one, I lifted the line ‘Another sick person trying to get well'—it's spray-painted at the corner of Wentworth and Barton [in Hamilton, Ontario]. I guess this song is just me trying to feel less alone. I feel like that’s everyone’s struggle: You wake up and ask yourself, 'Am I okay today?'”
“When You Go Home I Withdrawal” “I had bad separation anxiety as a kid. I was a crier before I had to go to kindergarten, or at bedtime. I shared a room with my older brother and would be afraid to sleep alone, because I was used to having someone else in the bedroom. So this is a song about separation anxiety. I'm a homebody, and I think it's because I have such bad social comedown experiences—I get home from somewhere fun and I feel it really bad in a weird way. This is track four because I think it's the best song on the record: 'Children' was track four on Death Lust, and 'Sun Poisoning' was track four on Home Made Satan—I always put my favourite in track four.”
“The Barbed Wire Fence Around Happiness” “'The Barbed Wire' was going to be the album title, but then Suffer Summer had more continuity with the other two, and one day I want to have the three albums live together in a box set. I wrote the first half of this song a cappella, and I think the line ‘There is a barbed-wire fence around happiness’ is probably the thesis of the album. That's the idea at the top of the chalkboard that I could work around. I was picturing a pool with a barbed-wire fence around it, and hopping the fence to get into the pool and just being that free. It's about getting some escape. Chastity's music is escapism—it's everything I friggin' write about.”
“Somersault” “This is a Smashing Pumpkins rip-off. By January 2020, I had the 10 songs written that I thought were going to be this album, and I wanted to go road-test them. I was supposed to be gone on tour for 80 days, and then come right back and go straight into recording them. But then March came, and we were all just back at home watching The Sopranos. That's when Dallas Green sent me that first riff—it was a voice memo called 'Pumpkins?'. He just offered it to me as a Chastity riff, and I was like, 'I have to fucking use this.' It was so sick. My friend Keegan [Powell] and I sped up the riff and took it from being a harder Pumpkins song to fuckin' '1979'. I was stuck at home and feeling stunned [by the pandemic] and this riff got me back to writing more and more—we ended up recording 24 songs for this album, and many more were written.”
“Happy Face” “This is the most non-fiction Chastity song—it's about my friend Andrew who died in a Salvation Army shelter in London [Ontario], metres away from where we record everything. He was the first outsider I ever met. I was such a Quiksilver-wearing elementary-school kid, and he was older and was like, 'Have you seen this Zero skate video called “Dying to Live”?' Neil Young was on that soundtrack, Slayer was on there, Nirvana—it was an insane soundtrack. He showed me that and The Misfits, and it really opened my world. After I met him, I grew my hair long, and it was, like, on for me. Andrew was a path changer for me, so learning about him dying was a fucking brutal heart-sinker.”
“Overstimulate” “When I put out Home Made Satan, people at shows were literally like, ‘Where's the distortion, man?’ And so with this song, I'm like, ‘Here it is!’ On the bridge, I asked everyone in my phone book to send me a voice memo of them singing this one lyric. I can hear my brother on there, and my booking agent with his English accent—it's pretty funny.”
“Vicious Circle” (feat. Dallas Green) “Dallas Green posted something nice on Instagram about 'Death Lust' when it came out, and I was just like, ‘Holy shit!' We were on tour, and I had to stop the car—I was like, 'I'm gonna cry.' To be recognised by your goddamn hero is so fucking weird and fulfilling. We met in Vancouver when he was opening for Alice in Chains, which is his favourite band. And he was like, 'Alice in Chains to Alexisonfire, Alexisonfire to Chastity—we're all in the same band, man!' We stayed in touch here and there, but I try not to punish him too much. [My wife] Linnea [Siggelkow, aka Ellis] and I wrote 'Vicious Circle' from a melody I had, and we ripped off the Pumpkins again for it, but then we put strings on it and I was like, 'This is too nice for me to sing on.' So Linnea helped me write a text to Dallas—she's a multiple co-writer on this one!—and he was like, 'Of course, pal, what do you want me to do?' We had recorded the strings at Catherine North [Studios in Hamilton, Ontario], which is where Dallas and Gord Downie had recorded [City and Colour's 2008 single] 'Sleeping Sickness', so we recorded his vocals there. And Dallas brought George Pettit [of Alexisonfire], who sang low harmonies on it. I literally bought a lottery ticket after because I was like, 'This is my goddman lucky day!'”
“Smiling” “This one has that line: ‘Open my skull/Please let me know when heaven's installed.’ I was just trying to ground the trilogy's finale in some reality. It's about asking for outside help with happiness, which is what I've got to do in real life constantly. This is the ending of the 30-song trilogy, but there's no end to this process—happiness is something that always has to be worked on.”