There’s something a little dangerous about releasing a self-titled record partway into a career. If a debut is self-titled, that’s an artist announcing themselves. But releasing a self-titled album two, three, four records in feels like a definitive flag-planting, a statement of self—it implies, at least slightly, that the previous records were experiments, but now you know who you are and what you’re here to do. There’s a certain pressure added. It’s sink or swim.
Four years and two records in, Montreal art-punk trio Cola—the project of U.S. Girls’ Evan Cartwright and Ought’s Ben Stidworthy and Tim Darcy—have released their own self-titled record. Cost of Living Adjustment is a clever workaround to the self-titled curse, spelling out the band’s acronym instead: a term for the wage adjustments workers are owed when inflation accelerates. It’s an apt name for a record that centers, to quote the album’s bio, a “socialism vs. hell” showdown. But as a semantic sidestep, it’s not necessary: Cost of Living Adjustment plays like the kind of declarative record a self-titled release promises, sharpening the band’s instincts into something leaner and more assured—the potential of 2022’s Deep in View and 2024’s The Gloss now fully realized.
From the first riff to the final chord, Cost of Living Adjustment never sits still. The opening stretch sets the tone: bleary electric guitar kicks off “Forced Position,” but rapid bass from Stidworthy sets an anxious tempo, Cartwright’s clever, skittering drums fluttering like skipped heartbeats. Darcy prowls through the song, delivering lines in a cool, evasive way he’s made his own, but this time he leans into melodicism rather than away from it. The same goes for “Hedgesitting,” which opens with gauzy strums before opening up into something sparser, tenser, stranger—Cartwright’s drums pushing forward like they’re trying to outrun the sampled rhythm beneath them, Stidworthy’s bass keeping everything taut and slightly off-balance. “When you were young, you came to make it,” Darcy drawls. “These are panic punches, but your arms have grown.” The texture shifts again in “Fainting Spells,” when the minor-key mandolin at its start loosens the song into something atmospheric, before Darcy’s bright guitar and Cartwright’s anthemic drumming transform it into room-filling maximalism. It’s one of the album’s recurring tricks: a song starts with a hard angle, then slowly reveals a second shape underneath it.
Cola never settles down, effortlessly rearranging itself around each new song, molding into shoegaze (“Third Double”), upbeat indie rock (“Much of a Muchness”), or Ought’s old post-punk (the excellently-titled “Satre-torial”). “Polished Knives” has a thicker, darker low end that gives the record a little more heft without abandoning Cola’s nervous elegance. Penultimate track “Favoured Over the Ride” borders on power-pop that’s more Fugazi than Big Star, with Darcy abandoning his oft-trodden paranoid monotone for a legitimate sing-along: “What’s on the ceiling that caught your gaze?” he croons, slight vibrato coloring the ends of the words. “I slowly descend back to Earth.” He even slightly channels Morrissey on the bittersweet dystopian closer, “Skywriter’s Sigh,” sweet-talking his way through lines like “Please don’t romanticize a better time / They’ll put your cot outside in the rain” atop Cartwright’s driving drums.
This isn’t to imply that Cola has left its minimalist edge behind altogether. “Haveluck Country” is an odd, stark number choked by a tight guitar line played in time with Cartwright’s four-on-the-floor percussion, Darcy’s apathetic delivery floating above it all, much like the capitalistic haze he satirizes—but just as you get comfortable in that taut suffocation, the track slips seamlessly into a smooth, lethargic bridge: “What if it was just a dream? Vivid luck, vivid luck, vivid luck,” Darcy sings, voice oddly reminiscent of Kevin Morby at the line’s end. The song lives somewhere in the niche lineage of Parquet Courts’ “Everyday It Starts” and The Fall’s “Totally Wired,” yet feels, in a way I can’t quite verbalize, like George Saunders’ Pastoralia in a song. Darcy is at his utter lyrical peak throughout the record, ceaselessly chronicling the hyperrealism of modernity with both Don DeLillo’s sardonic cynicism and Frank O’Hara’s poet’s eye for human detail: “A slight man with a squeegee, no rim or ridge / The cleanest windows look like cameras in their flashness,” he murmurs amidst the unflaggingly catchy melancholy of “Conflagration Mindset.”
Cola lives up to its name: simultaneously a critique of the trappings of capitalism (C.O.L.A., a system supposed to ensure the protection of citizens’ standards of living) and its tongue-in-cheek mascot (Coca-Cola, “a beverage bound by laws older than man to poison most ordinary life on earth,” to quote Deep in View’s “Landers”). But the album never sounds like thesis-padding; Cola is uninterested in penning a manifesto, focusing instead on mundane acts of observation and the grueling work of living. At his most direct, Darcy writes like someone describing a scene from a slight distance, as if the world’s absurdity has to be registered sideways before it can be felt at all. And at his most oblique, there’s still a lived-in intimacy to each word, an all-too-human experience captured between the lines. These are songs about the indignities of work, rent, and social exhaustion that arrive as gestures, glances, and overheard fragments rather than slogans—as moments in a life rather than commentary about it.
In that sense, Cost of Living Adjustment revolves around what it means to stay alert and aware in a world that keeps trying to blur into noise. We live in a time where seeing is no longer believing: a video of a celebrity saying a slur might be deep-faked, a photograph of a dog might be AI. In “Skywriter’s Sky,” Darcy tells of a sky edited green on a jumbotron, one of the few objective truths of our world (the sky is blue) thrown into question by our digital overlords. The song doesn’t stop at postmodernist suspicion, though. It pushes toward the stubborn, almost old-fashioned insistence that the world is still worth encountering firsthand, even at a cost. “I took out a loan to watch the night sky / I needed inspiration from the inverse of what I knew,” he sings. “A celestial event was worth a season of rent / And didn’t I know it.” If the album’s smartest instinct is to register how manufactured the world can feel, then its deepest instinct is to keep reaching for the real thing anyway, in content and sound alike. [Fire Talk]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
