There might have been a time when Toronto’s Pkew Pkew Pkew were the sort of punk band who revelled, unquestioningly, in the grimy chaos of the mosh pit, or an up-until-the-sun bender, or a skate session in an abandoned pool. But things have changed: the pit started to feel more like a workout, the bender gave way to a crushing hangover, and someone broke their wrist in that abandoned pool. That doesn’t mean that Mike Warne (guitars/vocals), Ryan McKinley (guitars/vocals), Emmett O’Reilly (bass/vocals) and David Laino (drums) will stop doing these things; it just means they realize they’re not good for them. So why don’t they stop?

Their new record, Optimal Lifestyles out 1st March on Big Scary Monsters, doesn’t offer any solutions, but instead catalogues these behaviours with unflinching clarity and precision. Warne writes in the same tongue as plot-driven realists like The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, not trading in metaphors or coded language but in undressed, literalist narratives over Pkew’s supercharged twin-guitar crunch. In the spring of 2017, Finn himself came up to workshop songs with the band in Toronto. “You know in school when you can hand your work in early, and the teacher will read it and give it back to you, and then you can really hand it in? It was kinda like that,” grins Warne.

Pkew Pkew Pkew have been on this beat for a while. They’ve opened on cross-continental runs with Anti-Flag and The Flatliners, headlined dates across North America, Europe and the U.K., and become mainstays at punk festivals like Montreal’s Pouzza Fest and Gainesville blowout The Fest. Along the way, they’ve accrued a loyal fanbase of both “sports dads and young kids that wanna drink and barf on each other,” Warne laughs. While their 2016 selftitled debut angled more towards the minutiae of the late-20s punk life, the new record steps back to look at the root causes.

“Is this good or is this bad?” Warne ponders of the lifestyle Pkew sings about. “It’s fun to live like an idiot, but it’s probably bad, also. We’re all constantly wondering if we’ve ruined our lives forever or not, being in a band.”

Song-by-song, the record lays out a journal of the sort of living Warne speaks of. Over the Japandroids-esque anthemics of “Thirsty And Humble,” a half-lit Warne counts $28 in his pocket, and the resultant mental math tells him he can afford three more beers to supplement the six already in his system, as well as his stash of drinks in the alley outside the bar.

Warne explains that alley-beers are a must for Pkew, who spent their early days taking multiple cabs to and from venues across Toronto. He admits that one of their early moneysaving schemes included packing a guitar case full of beers to sneak into gigs they were playing. Pkew’s openness on record is an undecorated representation of who they are. “I could worry a hell of a lot more than I do, but for some reason I don’t,” Warne says. But this isn’t a jokey, bro-ish shrug-off of his circumstances, and neither is Pkew’s a purely self-indulgent self-destruction. It’s an acceptance of the circular futility of life in Toronto, increasingly marked by hellishly-accelerated rent increases and unfeeling gentrification. More than anything, this record is about trying to cope with a city, an industry, a world that increasingly doesn’t seem to give a shit about people—only money.