Junior Battles Are Not Good At Sports

Toronto's underdog pop-punk mavens Junior Battles released their second full-length Rally back in May, a melodic orgcore masterpiece featuring dense, knotty, hook-laden takes on Lookout! Records punk and Canadian alternative music (think Alkaline Trio meets the Constantines on a baffling 7-inch split somewhere). Forming in 2007, the band released their debut record Idle Ages in 2011. Idle Ages was an acerbic manifesto on twenty-something anxiety, whereas their follow-up Rally self-assuredly tackles that same quarter-life restlessness with a resigned comfortability and a buttload of sports metaphors.

"Rally is us generally setting into something where we're both a lot happier and a lot less insecure," co-frontman and former MTV Canada host Sam Sutherland tells me over the phone. "At the same time, the record is still riddled with anxiety, but as compared to the last record that was just cataloguing your life and being paralyzed by fear, this is a step in a right direction."

Replete with "Seinfeld," "The Wire," and Office Space references, Rally tackles real jobs and real life with a terse, tense pop-punk verve that's every bit as self-effacing as it is celebratory. After finally releasing the record on vinyl a couple weeks ago, which you can stream here. I caught up with Sam and talked Snapchat, the Toronto Blue Jays, and Toronto's golden son Drizzy Drake Rogers.

Noisey: You guys had your "Bunk" music video debut on Noisey. What were some of the best antics from the shoot?
Sam Sutherland: I think having all of our friends at the beautiful Rob Zombie Room at the Rehearsal Factory in Toronto was kind of like the most fun. We basically did one shoot at this rehearsal space and one shoot over at Justin [Taylor, bassist]'s house. We weren't really sure what it was gonna be like, so we just started shooting ourselves playing in the room for awhile.

We had our friend Scott, this super cool designer and videographer who shot all this stuff on Snapchat, and we were like, "Okay, when our friends show up it's either gonna be super fun or super weird, 'cause we're just gonna keep playing the song over and over again and they're gonna have to pretend to have fun." But it really just actually captures a really fun night with us and our friends, with us forcing them to have fun and do dumb shit and the result is everyone had a lot of actual fun and we taped a lot of dumb shit.

Did you get your loyal fanbase to send in Snapchats as well?
Yes, we posted on all the relevant social mediums that we were doing this video via Snapchat. The thing is people think we're joking about the Snapchat thing and it's 100% sincere. It is my favourite contemporary app invention. All of our friends very sincerely use it to communicate throughout the day. So I think when we put it out on Twitter and Facebook, people were like, "Oh it's funny, you're making fun of Snapchat," but no, this is a love letter to Snapchat.

We ended up getting some really awesome stuff back. We got Mike Rokos from Dig It Up! and Hounds drinking in a full-blown dance club we still don't know where he was. We got this dude dancing in a taco costume that was pretty great. We just got people having weird nights. It was really a neat way to connect with people who give enough of a shit about the band to think what we were doing was funny and have this 10-second disappearing window into whatever they were up to. And now we just get random shit to our account, and it's always stuff like a dude in a taco costume. Actually, somebody on Twitter or Tumblr saw that and was like, "holy shit, that's my brother in a taco costume in the Junior Battles video" and I'm so glad we made someone's two minutes by having his brother in a taco costume in our video.

How'd your vinyl release party go?
We hadn't played Toronto in a long fucking time, and when we played it, none of us could remember the last time we played Toronto. So we got the CD version of Rally significantly earlier than the vinyl, and that was around the same time as the digital release back in May, and we had that tour we did through the states with the Flatliners and some one-off out of town shows, and we honestly never really sold it in Toronto, so we booked this show with a bunch of pals. Moldmaker played, which is this new band with the guitarist from The Decay, then Wasted Potential, who are thrashy-punk cool-ass shit from London, and then Shared Arms who are like, the best pop-punk band in Southern Ontario in the last 10 years.

It was without a doubt the craziest Toronto show we've ever played. We've always felt we had to leave the city to ever experience whatever the popularity of our band meant, not that we're a popular band, but in some towns we do pretty well. We have really good shows in Chicago. We've had amazing shows in Montreal. This was the first time we had a show like that in Toronto. It was like, "aw fuck, this city's cooool." It didn't feel like Toronto, it felt really huge and cool as fuck. And we had our vinyl and sold some and it doesn't skip. There's Stanley Cup silver with blood-splattered red and ice white with centre-line blue and goal-crease red, or whatever.

Which fits right in with the sports theme of record.
Yeah, we're just not into being creative. We picked a metaphor and we are going to run with it until everyone hates us.

Well, I love that you had a Rally release party at the 500 level of the SkyDome.
That was so fucking awesome. We used to have bands play in our old house, not that it was a show space, but we did a TV show there and had band practice there and stuff. We had A Wilhelm Scream, Joe Lally from Fugazi, the Flatliners, all playing in our basement and a ton of cool shit happened there. So we moved to this new house and we had this pretty nice deck and we thought it would be cool for the Idle Ages release if we just did a show on our deck. We had !ATTENTION! and Snake Oil Salesmen of Southern Ontario play on the Tuesday our album was released. We jokingly livestreamed it, which was literally just putting a laptop on a table and facing the webcam on what was happening and like, six people watched. So when it came time to do something for Rally, we wanted to do the same thing, where it was just us doing something as friends. We ended up just riffing on that and were like, "fuck, let's all go to a Jays game, that'll be fun." The whole record is ostensibly bookended by this outrageous, stupid sports metaphor, so why don't we make it a release party? Matt from Paper + Plastick made this poster that was like, "Junior Battles Rally Release Party" with the Junior Battles logo, the Jays logo, and the Rays logo, and then we went and hung out in the 500 section and told people if you find us, we'll give you a download code.

I think some people thought we were playing, like it was some great shit where we were in the dugout hanging with the boys and we'd come out during the seventh-inning stretch and throw shoes into the crowd. But it was literally just us sitting around in our seats. There's a great photo where it's just the four of us in the hundreds of seats around us. It was a Tuesday night game, the dome was closed, it was against the Rays, who were at that point like the worst team in baseball. Before we walked in, someone was like "yo, give me a copy of the record" and I was like, that's crazy, I didn't think we'd give one copy of this fucking thing away. And then, some kids were tweeting at us, and we told them where we were, and they came by and we gave 'em copies of the record and took photos. It was one of those things where some people were like, "that's fucking brilliant!" and we were like "we're just going to a baseball game."

Do you guys have a Junior Battles intramural sports team?
No, certainly not. None of us are athletic. Justin plays hockey…uhh…that's kind of it. It would be pretty terrible. It would be a pretty depressing league with all the kids who took band class instead of gym.

You guys also did this Thirst Behaviour show before Drake's OVO Music Festival. As huge Drizzy fans, Noisey has to know, what was this event?
There's two things. One is, it was very sincere: we are all huge Drake fans. It kind of sprung around from us sitting around after we did these shows with the Flatliners. We weren't looking down the barrel of a lot of really big shows and we're kind of too old to road-dog it just for the sake of road-dogging it; I'm not super-interested in leaving my job for three weeks to play for two people a night because that's what you're supposed to do. I think it kills the fun part of being in a band. We did a lot of touring on Idle Ages, and with this record, I wanted to make sure we were still working, like hanging out and doing creative stuff, so we started putting together a schedule of something interesting we could do once a month that wouldn't be necessarily getting in the van for two weeks but would be creatively rewarding and might be an interesting reason for people to remember we fucking exist.

Thirst Behaviour kind of spun out of that. I think everyone except Joel [Dickau, drummer] had tickets to OVO Fest. Our friend Dan Forcier, who runs Square Up Records and put out our first 7-inch, he for a while has done a pop-punk DJ night at Parts & Labour, this bar on Queen West in Toronto. We knew he had bands play once or twice, and we were like, let's just ask Dan if we can do an OVO pre-fest show and we can DJ or something. And then it turned into maybe we'll just do a Drake cover set. We kind of thought it would end up being a joke, but we took it very seriously and practiced a lot. So we played this Wednesday night, pretty late, and had a really good crowd at it and people went fucking crazy. I was playing drums so it was just Aaron [Zorgel, cofrontman] singing and we played like, 11 or 12 Drake songs and they ended up being recorded by the sound guy. I've heard the recording of it and, not just in my mind, it's pretty good, so I'm convinced there's going to be a Thirst Behaviour 7-inch.

What was the setlist?
You know, it was all hits man. I don't want to give it away, we want to do it again! The whole night was a success and it was the most fun I had playing music in a long time. The reaction was awesome because playing in Toronto, Drake is like fucking God. Playing "Headlines" or playing "Over", that just makes people lose their fucking minds. After our first practice we were all heading home, and we got the same text from Aaron that said, "oh my god guys, we fucked up. Why didn't we call it Less Than Drake?" Which I realize is a huge fucking mistake and I'm terribly sorry we're stuck with Thirst Behaviour now.

What's next up for you dudes?
We're already talking about writing stuff again. We wanna keep doing stuff like Thirst Behaviour and even the Rally release just going to the Dome and fucking hanging out and giving out the record for free. That's what's fun for us right now. We know we're not going to be playing the main stage at Fest, touring 300 days a year opening up for blink-182, but we're in an amazing place right now as a band where we can do really fun stuff and have 150 people come out and be stoked. That's just insane, to be able to sit around with your friends and be like, "we're gonna do a Drake cover set" and then have one of the best nights of your summer. Being able to do a record release show and having your pals play, and it being a fun show you'd want to be at anyways, it's the best. I don't know if we could be in a better place as friends playing music together. We're pretty fortunate.

Ivan Raczycki's favourite Drake song is "all of them" - @BeersCanada