Photo by: Grizzly Adams
Chastity is for the skids, the headbangers, the freaks. Chastity is for everyone who has suffered and survived the lethal combination of suburban overculture and mental distress. Chastity is especially for everyone who didn’t survive—the ones who didn’t get out. Brandon Williams did, luckily, and his work with Chastity has been to collect people like him, who got out by the skin of their teeth.
Today, Chastity shares an unreleased b-side from their self-titled LP, ahead of their Canadian shows in June + July. Titled “Jittery,” the song is about “…being in a relationship with someone cooler than you, wanting to be perceived as cool yourself, and losing your cool in the process,” Williams comments.
Chastity’s first three full-length records—2018’s Death Lust, 2019’s Home Made Satan, and 2022’s Suffer Summer—formed a trilogy that defined a 4 year arc of the band’s contribution to outsider music. Each record was informed by Williams’ life, but each was also conceptual and interpretive, refracting his experiences through a level of remove. On Chastity’s self-titled fourth record, there is no such distance: Williams decided to write a fully non-fiction work. Chastity is a 13-track record about the things that have always run through the band’s records—struggle, death, despair, redemption, darkness, and light—but this time, the songs ascend to new depths of intensity and desperation, new heights of resolution and power. “It’s really about the first nosedive that I did as a young person,” says Williams. “It’s a record about struggle, about the missing years. It’s also a thank you to some people in my life.”
Chastity, on tour:
June 13 – Soft Fest – London ON
June 28 – Whitby Music Fest – Whitby ON
July 19 – History – Toronto, ON
