Bad Waitress channel attraction and self-disgust on new single I Only Like You When I’m Drunk
Bad Waitress have released I Only Like You When I’m Drunk, a jagged new single taken from their forthcoming album In The Hollow, due on 30 October via Stomp Records.
The Toronto quartet’s second preview of the record follows August single Lovin’ Kind, but heads somewhere more volatile. Built around clipped guitars, tense basslines and a rhythm section that pushes the track towards collapse, I Only Like You When I’m Drunk turns an ugly admission into a tightly wound garage-punk blast.
Vocalist Kali-Ann Butala opens with the line, “You horrify me / Make everything shit around me”, before the song returns to its blunt, increasingly chaotic refrain: “I only like you when I’m drunk / I only like you when I’m fucked up and crazy.”
A bleary-eyed collision of desire and disgust
The track finds Butala and Katelyn Molgard’s guitars cutting through Nicole Cain’s bass and Moon’s drums, with the arrangement becoming more fractured as its narrator sinks deeper into a relationship they appear unable to escape. Rather than offering resolution, the song leaves its contradictions exposed: attraction, shame and chemical escape tangled together in under three minutes.
In The Hollow was recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto and produced by the band. The album was shaped by a period of shifting relationships, isolation and questions around identity, gender and sexuality, with the material dwelling on the less tidy parts of personal change.
Where Lovin’ Kind kept intimacy at a distance, I Only Like You When I’m Drunk moves directly into the mess, pairing nervous art-punk edges with the grime and release of a late-night garage-rock meltdown.
Stream I Only Like You When I’m Drunk here.
In The Hollow arrives on 30 October 2026. Find Bad Waitress music and merchandise here.
