Pain Olympics

“It is a reflection of the highs and lows of my own journey of self-discovery, rehabilitation and reflection across the past two years,” Zach Choy, drummer, vocalist and de facto spokesperson for Crack Cloud, tells Apple Music about the Canadian collective’s debut full-length. “I can hear where I was when it started, and I can hear where I was when we ended it.” Crack Cloud has been described as its members’ “recovery programme” from their own personal battles, and Choy assesses Pain Olympics’ blend of post-punk, hip-hop, electronica and industrial sounds as being a concept album of sorts, fundamentally about “finding your way through the world with a lot of baggage and trauma in tow. The medium is the message. Each individual song operates as an organ upon which the others rely.” Allow him, then, to act as your guide through the labyrinthine world of Pain Olympics. Post Truth (Birth of a Nation) “We wanted to create a world for the album, and to set the tone in a really grandiose, melodramatic way. This is that world’s ‘big bang’—it was a very visual concept. A frame of reference was the original Willy Wonka movie—going down that tunnel that Willy Wonka guides the children down, with its psychedelic nightmare sequence and range of emotions. The joy of working with a collective of people is that everyone specialises in and is geared towards different things. Here, a lot of the string arrangements were facilitated by one of our members who’s a connoisseur of that sort of thing—similarly, the industrial section. You hear these different elements and you hear the different people in our collective. This track is one of the best representations of the stitching-together that takes place within the collective and how things are pooled together based on one fundamental idea.” Bastard Basket “‘Bastard Basket’ felt like the natural antithesis to ‘Post Truth’. It’s pensive and brooding where ‘Post Truth’ is big and bombastic. We wanted to strip away the magnificence and ex