Album Review: Preoccupations – Ill at Ease (Born Loser Records)

Thirteen years into their role as one of Canada’s most unsettled musical entities, Preoccupations return with their fifth LP, Ill at Ease. It's an album that is radiant, grim, melodic, and mistrustful. If past work like Cassette (2017) and Viet Cong (2015) saw the band violently cutting at the barbed wire of structural austere post punk, Ill at Ease allows the wire to remain, but it's now humming and adorned with fairy lights. On October 2, Preoccupations bring their formidable and familiar sound to Control Club.

The band have described the album’s origin as botched sessions in Winnipeg, basement re-recordings in Brooklyn and Montreal, long nights of digital troweling from engineer Marcos Muniz. The result is a "defragged" collection that paradoxically feels like it’s always on the verge of falling apart. Tension is the album’s vernacular, but that tension is consistently rendered with clarity across its 8 tracks.

The recursive choreography of dread that permeates across the album is reinforced by Matt Flegel's world-weary yet bitterly funny lyrics, capturing the kind of apocalyptic exhaustion that feels intensely familiar. It's not spectacular, but it's a slow-burning doom. The party's been over for a while, but for some reason, we're still trying to find its peak. On "Sken," he sings: "I can’t believe the apocalypse is taking so long.” It's the kind of line that might be tragic if it weren’t offered like such a deadpan meme.

The album opens with “Focus” and eight literal door knocks. What follows is a taut sprint toward a panic attack. Though the groove is tight and the drums motorik, yet there's an oddly exultant undertow, especially in the B-52s-esque chorus.

“Bastards” is then an infectious synth-rock banger that throbs with Depeche Mode-style analogs. The sarcasm is at a near-luxuriant nihilism. “I think we’re ready for the asteroid,” Flegel shrugs. It’s the moment when you realise humanity is as disappointed in you as you are in it.

“Andromeda” is a mid-album stunner that sounds as if Interpol replaced chain-smoking with stargazing. Starting with a celestial synth, it slowly builds into a bright, yearning anthem about the coming collision of our galaxy with Andromeda. Flegel imagines himself alone in the middle of it all, missing the people he loves, trying to maintain poise in the face of inevitable obliteration.

Where previous albums thrived on aggression, Ill at Ease often subverts its momentum. “Retrograde” drags itself through a gauzy synth haze, mimicking the psychic sludge of cyclical habits. “Krem2,” the album’s closing track, is a detuned signal from a forgotten TV station that once flickered in your childhood living room—Proustian in its evocation of memory as both shelter and dislocation.

The most fascinating turn on Ill at Ease comes via “Panic.” Here, Preoccupations go maximalist with hints of noise, pop, industrial throb, and krautrock on a track that is almost polyphonic in its genre-blending. It's the kind of artistic work that recalls the frenzied multi-threaded logic of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay (Adaptation, perhaps). Timelines converge, identities slip, resolution defers, yet it holds together as a transmutation of panic into form.

Ill at Ease doesn’t pretend to offer catharsis. What Preoccupations offer instead is recognition of what it feels like to live with the constant, low-grade hum of social, emotional, and planetary unease. But also, the comfort knowing that when it all does finally end, we might as well go out humming.