Last time I wrote about Birds of Prrrey, a very new Montreal punk band, at the end of the piece I linked an article teasing an EP. After I posted, I chatted a bit with them and they told me they were aiming for an early-July release.

It’s here, it’s called Yet, We’re Still Growing in Place and it’s a fierce 15 minutes of 90’s-influenced throwback punk rock.

It’s raw, grunge-y, furious and perfectly imperfect. It sounds vital, like it was recorded live off the floor. Some tracks could almost pass for unproduced demo tracks from Hole’s Live Through This era. Singer Clarence fully commits on every song. She screams, howls, pushes her voice to the breaking point with fury and anger.

There are two tracks on Yet, We’re Still Growing in Place here that are new to me — A Man Invented Shoelaces and Hatemail, and they’re surprisingly different than the stuff in that CKUT video from the last post. Shoelaces sounds like a bright start to the record — the guitar and drums have a bit of a rockabilly feel, but when the vocal kicks in with “Look at me in my tiny skirt/your dirty comments I deserve”, it’s clear the song destined to besomething much heavier and angrier.

Omgcrowseverywhere.Com2003 is the heaviest thing on the record – foreboding and sinister from the first note, it eventually settles into a fuzzy, screamy, furious groove.

Hatemail dials it back at first — it starts out like a gentle alt-rock track with tons of reverb on the guitar and vocal, but transitions into a cynical and dead-inside mantra: “all I needed was to feel wanted”.

Noelle’s Emo Song is a slow-burner. The wistful and longing vocal gives way to a firece chant of “Peace, love, homicide“. Training Wheels ends the EP, and is the closest thing to a crowd-pleaser you’ll find on this record.

It’s a super-strong first release from a band with a lot of attitude.

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