LPs feature limited edition Purple Vinyl
In the lead-up to the release of Born Ruffians’ ninth album, Beauty’s Pride, the band’s singer/guitarist Luke Lalonde received a glowing endorsement from a notoriously hard-to-please critic: Luke Lalonde. “Whenever we finish a record, if I don't hate it, I'm usually just over it and I don't want to hear it again for a while,” he says. “Whereas when I put this record on, I actually think, ‘I like this! I think I might be a fan of this record!’”
We should take his opinion to heart—after all, no one’s in a better position to evaluate a Born Ruffians record than the guy who’s served as their principal songwriter for over 20 years now. When Lalonde, bassist Mitch DeRosier, and drummer Steve Hamelin left their hometown of Midland, Ontario in 2004 to make a go of it in Toronto’s vibrant post-Y2K indie-rock scene, the world was a very different place: “digital music” amounted to mislabeled files illicitly procured on Limewire after a five-hour download, mp3 blogs held kingmaking power over the underground, and social-media interaction was limited to checking out your friend’s band’s lo-fi demos on their janky MySpace page.
Since then, Born Ruffians have evolved as dramatically as the industry around them, gradually shifting from the precocious ‘n’ ferocious racket of their 2006 self-titled EP to the streamlined, studio-savvy indie-pop of 2013’s Birthmarks to the rousing E Street-inspired anthems of 2020’s JUICE.
The moment you drop the needle (or cursor) on Beauty’s Pride, it’s clear Born Ruffians have made good on a five-year-old promise to rip it up and start again. Just as the introductory synth fanfare of Kid A’s “Everything In Its Right Place” instantly demarcated Radiohead’s career into before/after phases, the opening of Beauty’s Pride presents an equally disorienting about-face, with a flurry of fidgety beats and beaming electronics whisking you into the euphoric strobe-lit banger “Mean Time.” Says Lalonde: “I just wanted to write something dancey, something completely out of the mould of the band. I was not writing it as a Born Ruffians song, that's for sure.”
Recording sessions for Beauty’s Pride began in the summer 2023, just as Lalonde was about to start another side project—i.e., becoming a dad. Now, it’d be a stretch to say Beauty’s Pride is a concept album about fatherhood—there are no songs here about the horrors of trying to change a diaper without a pack of wet wipes handy, or the meltdowns triggered by a lost stuffy. However, the album is rife with philosophical musings about the cyclical nature of life, and the need to make every second here count.
“With ‘Mean Time,’ I was reading Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak Memory, and I thought it was really beautiful,” Lalonde says. “At the very beginning, he writes about time, and how your life is essentially a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, and how we're sort of existing inside of these bookends. Maybe that idea used to be sort of panic-inducing to me—I’ve had a fear of death since I was a really little kid. But, lately I haven’t been feeling that way. I just think there’s something more beautiful about that briefness of life, and how we don't really know what's in the before and after.”
Recorded with returning Birthmarks producer Roger Leavens, and featuring mixing assistance from Gus Van Go (Metric, The Beaches), Beauty’s Pride is a studio creation through and through. While it was a bit of a shock to see a scrappy indie-rock band like Born Ruffians get signed by UK electronic imprint Warp back in 2006, the tranquil textures and electronically manipulated vocals of “All My Life” would fit right in with its roster of ambient soundscapers today. Other tracks savvily reanimate classic alt-rock styles for these totally-wired times: “Supersonic Man” imagines Oasis writing songs that sound like 2067 instead of 1967; “Do” is a ‘90s Weezer jam taken over by Daft Punk’s robots; and “Athena” harkens back to that early ‘80s moment when anti-social post-punk bands started writing socially conscious pop songs with exotic and excitable keyboard melodies. (Lalonde describes it as a track that “dips into capitalist dystopia for a moment, but in a fun, danceable way.”) Even seemingly straight-forward motorik indie-pop cruisers like “What a Ride” and “To Be Seen” are threaded with swirling synth effects and processed vocal filters that heighten the overall sense of disorientation and delirium. But the album’s shapeshifting productions and stylistic detours are anchored by a certain thematic consistency—however accidental.
The title of Beauty’s Pride may hint at the physical and emotional bonds between parents and their offspring—a theory reinforced by a brief cooing cameo from the littlest Lalonde on the closing title track—the phrase has actually been bouncing around Lalonde’s head for a few years. Its origins date back to a trip Luke took to India to visit his wife, who was doing research on her Ph.D at a dairy-farm facility over there. Upon borrowing a friend’s glittery purple child-size bike for a leisurely day ride, he noticed the words “Beauty’s Pride” emblazoned on the frame in big Disneyesque letters. Luke later discovered that the bike he borrowed that day didn’t actually belong to his friend—he had accidentally taken somebody else’s wheels. But his brief tenure as India’s most unwitting bike thief would fortuitously plant the seed for the album we have today.
“Where we’re normally scrambling at the 11th hour to find a title amongst the lyrics, something that sums up the feeling of the collection of songs we’ve assembled, this time we worked in reverse,” Luke says, “with the large, sparkling, purple light of ‘Beauty’s Pride’ guiding us all the way. But as much as it was influenced by the birth of his child, Beauty’s Pride also signifies the rebirth of his band. Perhaps the biggest surprise on the album comes in the form of “Can We Go Now,” a chillwavy psych-pop strut—coloured with Stereolab bleeps and vintage-videogame bloops—written and sung by Maddy Wilde, who officially joined the band in 2022. That makes it the first Born Ruffians track ever to originate from somewhere outside of Luke Lalonde’s brain—and, as such, completely blows open the possibilities of what a Born Ruffians song can be. As Lalonde puts it, “Her fingerprints are all over this album, and I think it's a great new ingredient in the Born Ruffians mix.”
So when Lalonde tells you that he’s really enjoying his band’s new album, he’s not being cocky or cheeky. He’s simply savouring a rejuvenating sensation that few artists get to experience as they enter their third decade of music-making. Pretty much all of the bands Born Ruffians came up with in the mid-2000s Toronto scene are long gone—Magneta Lane, Henri Faberge & The Adorables, and Wilde’s old band Spiral Beach, to name just a few. And last year, even their most successful peers—Tokyo Police Club—called it a day after a 20-year run. Born Ruffians have arrived at the point where a lot of bands give in to the nostalgic lure of album-anniversary tours, start contemplating the casino/fairground circuit, or call it quits. But the beauty of Beauty’s Pride lies in its refusal to accept any of those predestined fates. Rather, it presents Born Ruffians as the rare veteran act that can still make you feel like you’re discovering your new favourite band.
