Bad Waitress channel isolation and fractured identity on new album In The Hollow
Bad Waitress have released In The Hollow, their first full-length album in five years. Out now via Stomp Records, the ten-track record finds the Toronto quartet widening their jagged punk attack into a more spacious, unsettled and occasionally tender sound.
Self-produced and recorded with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto, In The Hollow follows 2021’s No Taste with songs shaped by personal and collective isolation, changing relationships, gender, sexuality and the unnerving process of becoming unfamiliar to yourself.
The band’s serrated guitar lines and volatile rhythms remain intact, but the new material makes room for eerie quiet, grim humour and a wilderness-inspired sense of scale. Memories of the Northwest Territories and Pacific Northwest surface throughout the record, lending its most inward-looking moments a darker, more elemental atmosphere.
A crooked portrait on 45
Release-week focus track 45 offers one of the album’s most compassionate detours. The song studies a troubled, booze-soaked figure through cigarettes, crooked smiles and rambling conversations, holding frustration and affection in the same unsteady frame.
Rather than offering easy redemption, the track circles the wish that someone might have had a different life. Its emotional pull comes from that tension: disappointment remains, but so does care.
From intoxicated friction to spiritual collapse
Elsewhere, I Only Like You When I’m Drunk turns attraction, disgust and intoxication into a messy collision, while Galleria Shopping Centre makes a mundane shopping trip feel increasingly disorientating. The Hunt moves into more violent terrain, with images of guns, bones, storms and a heart bleeding black.
The title track brings cello from Michael Peter Olson into Bad Waitress’ abrasive world, as spiritual imagery curdles into confrontation. Olson returns on closing cut Low, where the record folds in on itself around emotional dependence, lies and the stark admission: “I feel low / So low.”
Bad Waitress said: “We hope these songs offer listeners a space to process their own experiences while encouraging empathy for perspectives different from their own.”
Stream In The Hollow here, or find Bad Waitress’ music and merchandise here.
More Bad Waitress on Punkinfocus: Bad Waitress unravel on I Only Like You When I’m Drunk (October 2026) · Bad Waitress sharpen their edges on new single Lovin’ Kind (September 2026)
