KEN YATES RELEASES SINGLE/VIDEO, "CONSOLATION PRIZE" FT. KATIE PRUITT

NEW ALBUM, CERULEAN, DUE OUT JUNE 3, 2022

WATCH / SHARE “CONSOLATION PRIZE” FT. KATIE PRUITT HERE
BUY / STREAM “CONSOLATION PRIZE” FT. KATIE PRUITT HERE

PRE-ORDER CERULEAN HERE

TOUR DATES BEGIN THIS SUMMER

"An enchanting song of acceptance and resolve, Ken Yates’ “The Big One” is a soothing and stirring apocalyptic lullaby that finds refuge in the face of life’s fragility." Atwood Magazine

"Ken has earned a strong reputation as a bona-fide composer who combines his emotionally charged storytelling with some incredible and unforgettable melodies.” - Great Dark Wonder

“Yates has now asserted himself as one of Canada’s most unique folk artists with a true knack for effective songwriting.” Canadian Beats

Photo Credit : Jen Squires // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, singer-songwriter Ken Yates releases his second single from his upcoming full length, Cerulean. The accompanying snow-filled video for "Consolation Prize" featuring Katie Pruitt sees Yates lose a ski race and earn a consolation prize in the playful, Wes Anderson-inspired video directed by Adam Cook. The melancholic track finds Yates back with his sweet, signature guitar strums, only this time, exploring the depths of a heartbreaking unrequited love. FLOOD Magazine notes that “Consolation Prize features "downcast energy and confessional lyrics while adding layers to its lush soundscape.”

Explaining the origin of the track, Yates says, "I wrote this song as somewhat of a sequel to the song ‘Quiet Talkers’ from my last album. That song is about finding solace in the company of a complete stranger for a night. I wrote ‘Consolation Prize’ imagining how that relationship might look a few years in the future, with one of the characters falling in love, and the other person not feeling the same way. I think one of the hardest types of love is loving someone who doesn’t love you back, but still wishing the best for them."

Diving into the thought behind the video, Yates explains,"’Quiet Talkers’ uses footage of a retro ski ballet, so director Adam Cook and I came up with the idea of filming a retro, Wes Anderson style, cross-country ski race. We got a few friends together in minus 20 degree weather and strapped the camera operator to the back of a snowmobile to film us racing. I love trying to incorporate some of my hobbies into my music videos, and Adam and his crew were total champions for filming all day in freezing cold temperatures."

WATCH / SHARE “CONSOLATION PRIZE” FT. KATIE PRUITT HERE
BUY / STREAM “CONSOLATION PRIZE” FT. KATIE PRUITT HERE

In addition to the new music, Yates will be performing four live shows, with more to be added, this Summer across Ontario. Tickets are available now here.

MORE ABOUT KEN YATES & CERULEAN

Over the last decade, Ken Yates has solidified himself as a prolific musician, combining heartfelt lyricism, genuine authenticity and hypnotic guitar strums. After studying at the Berklee College of Music, Yates released The Backseat EP in 2011, followed by his full-length debut Twenty-Three in 2013. He won the Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award in 2014 for his song "The One That Got Away" and released his second album, Huntsville, in 2016, produced by Jim Bryson. By 2017, Yates was making waves in folk with his poignant songwriting, winning the awards for Canadian Folk Music Award for both Songwriter of the Year and New Artist of the Year. 

Now, with a fresh perspective and renewed sense of self, Yates brings honesty, growth and profound peace to his latest work, Cerulean. Nonetheless, Cerulean feels like a hard reset on Yates’ art and artistry. Reuniting with producer Jim Bryson, the album firmly steps into indie folk and alternative territories – he cites Big Thief, Andy Shauf, and The War On Drugs as a few of his inspirations.

Cerulean meets Yates at his darkest and most vulnerable, as he transforms the pain of grief, fear and loss into an 11-track quest towards hope, light and peace. A crucial vehicle out of the depths of darkness and bitterness for Yates, Cerulean serves as a powerful reemergence filled with his signature remarkable vocal intimacy as well as a profound yet candid peak into the universal human experience.

In May 2020, Yates released his third album, Quiet Talkers, which was met with high praise from tastemakers like Atwood Magazine, who wrote the album's track, "Surviving is Easy" is "an earnest, heartfelt rendering of everyday struggle." Praise also has come in the form of a co-sign from fellow musician John Mayer who said, “Want to hear a great song? I mean a REALLY great song? Ken Yates wrote a tune called “I Don’t Wanna Fall In Love” and posted a live video of it on YouTube. This song moved me when I first heard it and it still does today.”

Read Ken Yates’ full biography by Mitch Mosk at : www.killbeatmusic.com/kenyates

PRE-ORDER CERULEAN HERE

DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

CERULEAN TRACKLIST
01. The Big One (feat. Kathleen Edwards)
02. The Future Is Dead 
03. Don’t Mean To Wake You (feat. Stephanie Lambring)
04. Consolation Prize (feat. Katie Pruitt)
05. Small Doses
06. Best Of The Broken Things 
07. Honest Light (feat. Caroline Marie Brooks) 
08. Half Clenched Teeth 
09. Good Things (feat. Liz Longley) 
10. Grocery Store 
11. Cerulean 

KEN YATES LIVE
June 19 - Smith's Falls, ON - Bowie’s
June 19 - London, ON - Aeolian Hall
June 25 - Hamilton, ON - Mills Hardware w/ Abigail Lapell 
June 27 - Londonderry, NH - Concerts on the Common 

All tickets can be found HERE

*** More dates will be announced soon ***

KEN YATES ONLINE
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PUP’S NEW LP OUT TODAY

THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND, OUT TODAY VIA LITTLE DIPPER / UNIVERSAL MUSIC CANADA

BUY / STREAM THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND HERE

UNIVERSAL MUSIC STORE

SPRING TOUR DATES INCLUDE COACHELLA & SHAKEY KNEES ON SALE NOW

"transmuting life’s frustrations into unhinged visceral joy." Stereogum, Album Of The Week

"This feels like everything that punk should be in 2022. It’s honest, dark, funny, tragic, moving and incredibly catchy. This is PUP’s finest album to date." Clash 9/10

"the funniest, darkest, and weirdest PUP album yet, which also makes it the PUP-iest thing PUP have ever done." Brooklyn Vegan

"PUP is unraveled. Long live PUP." SPIN

"coming apart at the seams never sounded so good." Northern Transmissions

"the quartet have made an art (and career) of turning their breakdowns into achingly catchy but complex blasts of poppy punk that are as rife with humour as they are despair." Kerrang 4/5

"all the catchy, fast-paced melodies, big singalongs, and ooh-oohs and whoa-oas that you could want in a PUP record" Exclaim!

"one of the most beloved rock bands on the planet have made an album to defy expectations and shake up the accepted order of things in the best possible way." Upset Magazine

Photo Credit: Vanessa Heins // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, Toronto punk heroes PUP—comprised of Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski—have released their incredible, ambitious and aptly titled fourth album, THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND.

THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND was recorded and mixed over the course of five weeks in the summer of 2021, in GRAMMY Award-winning producer Peter Katis’ bat-filled mansion in Connecticut. Full of typically furious, ridiculous and anthemic songs, the recording process allowed PUP to push themselves further than ever before. With more time in the studio, they were able to craft their songs sonically in a way they were unable to in the past, and allowed themselves to incorporate new instruments like piano, synths, horns, and more for the first time. Though made in madness-inducing isolation (aside from Peter and the bats, of course), PUP were remotely joined on the album by Sarah from Illuminati Hotties, Kathryn from NOBRO, Mel from Casper Skulls, and Erik from Remo Drive. The result is not just the next PUP record, but the *most* PUP record.

WATCH / SHARE “TOTALLY FINE” HERE

PUP will unravel right before your very eyes on tour, starting in the U.S. next week. See below to find a show, including festivals such as Coachella and Shaky Knees, below. Tickets are on-sale now HERE.

WATCH / SHARE “ROBOT WRITES A LOVE SONG” HERE

MORE ABOUT THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND
PUP released Morbid Stuff in 2019 to critical acclaim, earning countless year-end nods from the likes of Pitchfork and NPR, their late-night debut on Late Night With Seth Meyers, the JUNO award for Alternative Album of The Year, the short list for the Polaris Music Prize, and sold-out shows across the globe. Two years later, they spent a few weeks in the Summer of 2021 in a mansion in Connecticut with Peter Katis (Interpol, Kurt Vile, The National) to record and mix their new record, THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND.

The band—Babcock, bassist Nestor Chumak, drummer Zack Mykula, and guitarist Steve Sladkowski—more or less never left. When the band got comfortable in its strange new home, the (figurative) walls came down. “As the weeks passed, we seemed less and less rational, objective, and sane,” Babcock says. “You can hear the band start to fall off the cliff, and because of that, I think this record is our truest and most genuine to date. There is nothing more PUP than a slow and inevitable descent into self-destruction.” 

LISTEN AND SHARE “WAITING” HERE

Every PUP record arrives with an implied “contents under pressure” warning; the tension between the band’s instinct for the melodic and its gift for chaos propels the songs forward while making them also seem close to flying apart in a horrifying spray of tears and gore. THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is the sound of a band that is not just comfortable with but in command of that chaos. “There’s only so many times you can write a song about how much you hate yourself before you write a song about how fucking good you are at hating yourself,” Babcock says. “It’s funny that we’ve provided for ourselves by being fuck-ups and writing songs about being fuck-ups. We’ve been fuck-ups forever, and now we’ve got a responsibility, to others and to ourselves, to fuck up in a productive manner.”

WATCH / SHARE “MATILDA” HERE

Babcock says. ““I wanted to write about the horrible state of the world, but through a very specific and personal lens. It’s a lot of me trying to articulate my own coping with existential dread, hopelessness, and what I’ve called ‘Grim Reaping’—which is to me, the idea that we are all reaping what we sow, and right now we’re sowing some pretty fucked up shit.”

THE UNRAVELING is not a departure from what got PUP here, really; for all the new breadth, this is still very much the fourth album by the band that has spun songs about The Bad Decisions Lifestyle into scrappy art. The hooks are as bright and barbed as always; the poison threaded through every song is no less potent. But a fourth album should be different from the first, or even the third, and THE UNRAVELING is. “I don’t know that we set out to do new stuff,” Mykula says, of a record on which the band does a great deal of new stuff. “It’s just a band trying to sound as much like themselves as possible. Every record you make, you get closer to that.” 

THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is that next step—not towards perfection, or even towards some more perfect version of writing songs about fucking up, but just in the direction of its choice. It’s a product of this endless awful broader moment, but also very much a step forward into that uncertainty. “The whole album process really brought us closer together, even as things unraveled,” Babcock says. “It’s hands down my favourite PUP record, and I don’t think it could’ve been made under any other circumstances.” 

BUY / STREAM THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND HERE

Album Artwork Credit: Jordan Speer // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND TRACKLIST
01 Four Chords 
02 Totally Fine
03 Robot Writes A Love Song
04 Matilda
05 Relentless
06 Four Chords Pt. II: Five Chords
07 Waiting
08 Habits
09 Cutting Off The Corners
10 Grim Reaping
11 Four Chords Pt. III: Diminishing Returns
12 PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy

TOUR DATES
4/1/22 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Roxian Theatre *^
4/2/22 - Columbus, OH @ Newport Music Hall *^
4/3/22 - Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre *^  [SOLD OUT] 
4/5/22 - Minneapolis, MN @ The Fillmore *^
4/8/22 - Victoria, BC @ Capital Ballroom ^ 
4/9/22 - Victoria, BC @ Capital Ballroom ^ [SOLD OUT]  
4/10/22 - Seattle, WA @ Showbox SoDo ^ ‡
4/11/22 - Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom +^ 
4/13/22 - Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades +^ 
4/15/22 - Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival
4/16/22 - Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren +^ 
4/17/22 - San Diego, CA @ Casbah + [SOLD OUT]  
4/18/22 - San Diego, CA @ Casbah ^ [SOLD OUT]  
4/20/22 - San Francisco, CA @ The Warfield+^
4/21/22 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda #^
4/22/22 - Indio, CA @ Coachella Music and Arts Festival
4/24/22 - Denver, CO @ The Ogden Theatre +^ 
4/25/22 - Boulder, CO @ Boulder Theater +^ 
4/27/22 - Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater +^ 
4/28/22 - Houston, TX @ House of Blues +^ 
4/29/22 - Austin, TX @ Stubb's Waller Creek Amphitheater +^ 
5/1/22 - Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Music Festival
5/3/22 - Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel +^ 
5/4/22 - Raleigh, NC @ The Ritz +^ 
5/5/22 - Richmond, VA @ The National +^ 
5/6/22 - Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall +^ 
5/7/22 - Washington, DC @ The Fillmore Silver Spring +^ 
5/9/22 - Sayreville, NJ @ Starland Ballroom +^ 
5/10/22 - Boston, MA @ House of Blues +^ 
5/11/22 - New York, NY @ Terminal 5 +^ 
5/13/22 - Montreal, QC @ MTelus +^
5/14/22 - Toronto, ON @ History +^  [SOLD OUT]  
5/15/22 - Toronto, ON @ History +^
5/31/22 - Peterborough, ON @ The Venue !
6/1/22 - Kingston, ON @ The Ale House !
6/3/22 - Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues $
6/4/22 - Royal Oak, MI @ The Royal Oak $
6/5/22 - Cincinnati, OH @ Bogart’s $\
6/6/22 - Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall Ballroom $
6/8/22 - Indianapolis, IN @ Hi-Fi Annex $ 
6/9/22 - Lawrence, KS @ The Granada $
6/10/22 - St. Louis, MO @ The Pageant $
6/11/22 - Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl $
6/13/22 - Charleston, SC @ Charleston Music Hall $
6/14/22 - Columbia, SC @ The Senate $
6/15/22 - Norfolk, VA @ The NorVa $
6/17/22 - Holyoke, MA @ Race Street Block Party $
6/18/22 - Buffalo, NY @ Asbury Hall $
7/3/22 - St. Catharines, ON @ Born & Raised Concert Series
7/8/22 - Cheltenham, UK @ 2000trees Festival
7/19/22 - Adelaide, Australia @ The Gov
7/21/22 - Melbourne, Australia @ The Croxton
7/22/22 - Sydney, Australia @ Factory Theatre
7/30/22 - Omaha, NE @ Maha Festival
7/23/22 - Byron Bay, Australia @ Splendour in the Grass
8/26/22 - Málaga, Spain @ Canela Party Festival
10/12/22 - Leeds, UK @ Leeds Beckett Students Union
10/13/22 - Manchester, UK @ O2 Ritz
10/14/22 - London, UK @ The Roundhouse
10/16/22 - Glasgow, UK @ SWG3 Galvanizers
10/17/22 - Dublin, IE @ Academy 2
10/19/22 - Brighton, UK @ Chalk
10/20/22 - Bristol, UK @ SWX
10/21/22 - Birmingham, UK @ O2 Institute
10/23/22 - Paris, FR @ Backstage
10/24/22 - Brussels, BE @ Ancienne Belgique
10/25/22 - Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg
10/26/22 - Köln, DE @ Bürgerhaus Stollwerck
10/28/22 - Berlin, DE @ So36
10/29/22 - Warsaw, PL @ Hybrydy
10/30/22 - Prague, CZ @ Rock Cafe
11/1/22 - Milan, IT @ Bloom
11/2/22 - Munich, DE @ Strom
11/3/22 - Hamburg, DE @ Gruenspan
11/5/22 - Copenhagen, DK @ Pumpehuset

! with support from Casper Skulls  
‡ with support from Beverly Crusher
# with support from Skegss
^ with support from Pinkshift
$ with support from Oceanator
* with support from Cloud Nothings
+ with support from Sheer Mag

PUP ONLINE
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CASSIDY MANN’S NEW EP OUT TODAY, SHARES NEW VIDEO

WATCH / SHARE “TROPICAL SOUR CANDY” HERE

CASSIDY MANN’S NEW EP, IF IT’S NOT FOREVER, OUT TODAY VIA DONOVAN WOODS AND MICHELLE SZETO’S NEW LABEL, END TIMES MUSIC

BUY / STREAM IF IT’S NOT FOREVER EP HERE

TOUR DATES SUPPORTING DONOVAN WOODS BEGIN APRIL 20 

TORONTO DATE ON MAY 13 WITH EDWIN RAPHAEL NOW ADDED

 ALL TICKETS HERE

Photo Credit : Adam Kelly // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

By entwining her acoustic roots with gentle electronic textures Cassidy Mann finds her true voice on her debut EP, If It’s Not Forever, out today via End Times Music, the new label created by Donovan Woods and Michelle Szeto. Co-producing with her friend Roman Clarke, Mann wanted to find a cinematic yet wistful sound to complement these emotionally driven pop songs. They achieved that effect through reverb and delay on the guitars, along with crafting lyrics about specific moments in past relationships. 

If It’s Not Forever, serves as a catalogue of how Mann’s early relationships ended and why – and she hopes that other people will feel seen and comforted by her stories. Today, she shares the visualizer for a song that was written while processing one particular breakup. She remembers sitting on her bed and eating the same sour candy she once shared with the person she missed. When she discovered the metaphor – “this thing that seems sweet, but also physically hurts you if you have too much,” as she describes it – the song “Tropical Sour Candy” emerged.

“It’s a sort of low-grade torture that related exactly to what I was putting myself through mentally,” says Mann. “So lyrically this song is super literal but it’s also just very true. Everything in this song is a real memory and writing each one down helped me actually start letting them go.”

WATCH / SHARE “TROPICAL SOUR CANDY” HERE

MORE ABOUT IF IT’S NOT FOREVER

As a lyricist, Mann often reshapes a small moment into a powerful and poetic song that feels both personal and relatable. “My favourite thing is to write about tiny things that make the bigger picture more important somehow,” she says. “I was wondering a lot about how two people can be in the same situation and have different memories attached to those times. It’s interesting to me how memories are interpretable that way.” 

She wrote “Election Night", tweaking the melodies with Clarke, to capture the intense awakening and transformation that many people experienced over the four years of the prior presidency. The lyrics focus on a couple that moved beyond just friends that night but ultimately ended as strangers. Her skill as a writer is especially clear on “Fine” as that simple word takes on multiple meanings in the context of a heartbreak.

WATCH / SHARE “FINE” VISUALIZER HERE

Certain moments in a relationship are almost always at the core of her songs, whether it’s the potential start of something special (“Since I Met You”) or the inevitable end (“Stop A Heart”). There’s also an acknowledgement that listeners can carry those important parts of the past through the rest of their lives (“If It’s Not Forever”). 

“A lot of the time, whenever I’m remembering something, I find myself connected to these subtle moments that made me feel alive in some way. Those are the things that I replay in my mind a lot.” 

MORE ABOUT CASSIDY MANN
Growing up in the Prairies of Winnipeg, Mann has been singing since she could talk. Her parents bought her a guitar as a birthday present when she was 9. By 14, she started taking songwriting more seriously and her emerging talent led to a nomination for Aboriginal Recording of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards. Still, she felt uncertain about the next step.

WATCH / SHARE “SINCE I MET YOU” VISUALIZER HERE

“In my early teens I wasn’t sure what music was going to be to me,” she says. “I was writing and playing shows a lot but after high school I studied film for a while and worked in restaurants. I definitely meandered a bit before really deciding that this is what I was going to do.” 

Her family’s Indigenous community of Sagkeeng First Nation offered encouragement and support throughout her journey-- and she notes how Indigenous tradition influences her. 

“When it comes to my Indigenous heritage and cultures, it is based around oral storytelling – songs and spoken stories,” Mann observes. “That is so fascinating to me and it ties into my music a lot because that’s how memories and experiences have been captured in my culture forever. Storytelling is something I feel compelled to do. I think it probably has a lot to do with the fact that that’s what my ancestors did.” 

WATCH / SHARE “ELECTION NIGHT” VISUALIZER HERE

Still, in her formative years, Mann struggled to blend her introspective writing style with her love of the enticing pop influences of her generation. Plus, she often found it difficult to communicate her creative concepts to the older men she worked with in the studio. Knowing she needed to be more involved in the process, she opted to learn as many production techniques as possible on her own by watching online videos, taking courses in audio engineering, listening to older music as a study in song structure, and doing a deep dive into her favourite artists and their influences for inspiration. 

“I felt like I was given permission to do whatever I wanted to do,” she says. “Becoming really involved in production is what helped me come to a place where I feel fully represented in the music that I make.” 

Relocating to Toronto after a difficult breakup, Mann made a bunch of demos on her own while relentlessly searching for that certain sound. She brought the demos to Roman Clarke and they experimented on the new songs together, ultimately transcending genre and tapping into the evocative feelings that permeate If It’s Not Forever. 

“When I listen to these songs now, I feel a sense of peace because I have captured the story I wanted to tell, and I’ve also captured a lot of the nuance surrounding it,” she says. “I’m telling a story of my evolution and the relationships that I’ve gone through, but this is only my version of the experience and the way I remember it. It took me a while to figure out how to express that lyrically and sonically but I feel really proud of the fact that I do think that’s pretty clear in the music.”

BUY / STREAM IF IT’S NOT FOREVER EP HERE

2022 TOUR DATES // TICKETS HERE
Apr 20 - Sarnia, ON - The Imperial Theatre *
Apr 21 - Sarnia, ON - The Imperial Theatre *
Apr 22 - Meaford, ON - Meaford Hall Arts & Cultural Centre *
Apr 23 - Huntsville, ON - Algonquin Theatre *
May 4 - Vancouver, BC - Hollywood Theatre *
May 5 - Vancouver, BC - Hollywood Theatre *
May 8 - Edmonton, AB - Winspear Centre *
May 9 - Calgary, AB - Jack Singer Concert Hall *
May 10 - Saskatoon, SK - Broadway Theatre *
May 11 - Saskatoon, SK - Broadway Theatre *
May 12 - Winnipeg, MB - Burton Cummings Theatre *
May 13 - Toronto, ON - The Drake %

* supporting Donovan Woods
% supporting Edwin Raphael 

DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

IF IT’S NOT FOREVER TRACKLIST
01 Tropical Sour Candy
02 Election Night
03 Fine
04 Stop A Heart 
05 Since I Met You
06 If It’s Not Forever

CASSIDY MANN ONLINE
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FACEBOOK

MORE ABOUT END TIMES MUSIC

The core of End Times’ mission is transparency and adaptability. In the world of streaming, the data is available. Artists should understand their expenses and their earnings as well as anyone they work with. It allows us to interpret and react to how, why, and where songs are being discovered. 

There are many pathways to success, and success looks different to everyone. Every artist and every project is unique and artists should be confident that the team built around them is being created thoughtfully and purposefully in service of their individuality. 

We’ll focus on songwriters, regardless of genre, and work together to make their music valuable by getting it to people who will use it and love it.

END TIMES MUSIC ONLINE
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