Juice

Born Ruffians’ sixth album features no songs explicitly about breakfast beverages, but it packs the refreshing, revitalizing punch of one. With JUICE, you get Born Ruffians concentrate with no pulp—a swift nine-song, 30-minute serving that cold-presses the locomotive momentum of The Velvet Underground, the winsome, self-depracating musings of Paul Simon, and the brassy spectable of the E Street Band (thanks to guest saxophonist Joseph Shabason, best known for his work with Destroyer and The War on Drugs). Fourteen years on from the release of their debut EP, JUICE finds the Toronto trio of Luke Lalonde (guitar and vocals), Mitch DeRosier (bass), and Steve Hamelin (drums) still rocking out with undiminished vigor, albeit with a focus and precision that reflect the subtle yet substantial strides they’ve made from the proudly disjointed racket of their teenage-phenom phase. But if JUICE represents the purest manifestation of the Ruffians’ rambunctious indie-rock aesthetic, it could also signal the imminent retirement of it. “I think this might be the last straightforward rock ’n’ roll album that we’ll make,” Lalonde tells Apple Music. “This record came right out of the same period as [2018’s] Uncle, Duke & the Chief, and on both records it felt like we were trying to go straight to the chase for that sound. And I think we now all feel like we've done that, and we've done it in as many ways as we can do it. So we've been talking a lot about consciously trying to make something different next time.” With that, Lalonde takes us on a track-by-track tour of the Ruffians’ possible farewell to rock.

I Fall in Love Every Night
“I don't write a ton of love songs, but I was just thinking about how fortunate I am to have love, to feel love, and how that can translate to all of your relationships. There's so much to love in the world if you just open yourself up to it. It's easier for me to gravitate towards the darker things, and there's a certain narrative in the news being pushed of fear, anxiety, and panic—which is warranted—but I also think it's distorted and overblown to a point, and if you just shift your focus a little bit, you can spend a little bit of time feeling the opposite of that.”

Breathe
“I have a really bad memory. I’ll be sitting around with friends reminiscing and I'll be the guy that's like, ‘I don't remember that!’ But then there are certain memories that pop up uninvited and just impose themselves onto me so vividly, and I wanted to write about that. And they're not always great memories—you'll be sitting on the bus and all of a sudden you’ll make an audible gasp because you've just recalled this time that you said something rude to somebody when you were 11 years old and you relive it as if it just happened. So it’s a song about memory, and how strange it is sometimes.”

Dedication
“The word 'dedication' came out of that speaking-in-tongues style of writing lyrics, where you're jamming on the song and you just keep saying some word over and over, and I kept saying 'dedication, dedication.' And then I worked backwards from there and realized that it's a very cynical take on humanity. Modern humans, especially in Western colonial-takeover societies, are dedicated to consumption. Greed is fueling the complete consumption and exhaustion of everything, to the point where we're willing to completely self-destruct. And it takes quite a lot of dedication to achieve the level of destruction that we have inflicted on the planet.”

The Poet (Can’t Jam)
“This song to me is just about insecurity—focusing on things I can't do, and the self-doubt over things that I quote-unquote can do. As a songwriter, you often feel like an impostor. You're filled with doubt, you're not sure you deserve anything you have, because you don't believe in yourself. And I think the mantra repeating over and over in the song—‘I can't do this, I can’t do that’—maybe is intended to elicit the opposite response, ironically.”

I’m Fine
“It's basically a love song. There's not too much guarded in there behind metaphor. It's about seeing someone who blows your socks off or takes your breath away, and then running towards—or away from—that feeling of lust. To us, the vibe felt like a late-'70s Jonathan Richman/Modern Lovers song.”

Hey You
“This is definitely the oldest song on the record. We had Maddy Wilde [of Moon King] come in and sing on the demo for it back in 2014. And then when we dug it up for this record, we asked Maddy to come back in. It's another love song. But since we wrote it, it's been inseparable in my mind from that archetypal movie scene where the boy goes to pick up the girl for prom, the dad answers the door and he goes in, and then the prom date appears at the top of the stairs, and 'Hey You' is playing while she walks down in slow motion.”

Squeaky
“This is the most densely packed lyrical song on the record. I picture it as a short film: You start at the end with the protagonist in the woods as she's building her fire—which is obviously metaphorical, as fire often is! And then in the second verse, the camera pulls out to outer space and we're looking at a distant sun twinkling off in the distance, and orbiting around it are other planets that might contain a person looking up at us and wondering if we're out there. It's about how incomprehensibly small we are in the universe and how meaningless we are, but then it's also about how an individual on our planet can create change that sweeps everybody into it, and we all become this fire of positive change.”

Hazy Wave/Wavy Haze
“‘Wavy Haze’ came first—it's a song about memory, specifically the memories of my first year out of high school living in Toronto with Mitch and Steve, when we all lived in a house together. We almost called the record ‘Wavy Haze,’ and then it just felt like a fitting name for our new label—we started together when we were 15 years old, and now we’ve got a record label, and the title just felt like an apt metaphor, considering what the song is about. We had the intention of connecting every song on the record so that it would all flow together, but we just ended up doing that for the first three songs and the last three. So we created ‘Hazy Wave’ as an interlude to connect ‘Squeaky’ and ‘Wavy Haze,’ to go from the key of G to the key of C. Since the song is about memory, we wanted to bring 'Wavy Haze' out of an auditory haze of drones and synthy loops and cymbal washes.”