Artist: Chief State
Album: Waiting For Your Colours
Vancouver pop punks, Chief State, have released their debut full-length album, Waiting For Your Colours. The album is available for streaming anywhere you get your music.
Chief State was formed after frontman Fraser Simpson headed to Craigslist to find bandmates. There he connected with members Nik Pang, Chloe Kavanagh, Justin Pham and Joseph Soderholm to create Chief State. According to the band, Waiting For Your Colours is the culmination of 5 years of relentless hustle, blood, sweat, and tears.
Of the album, Simpson says, “There’s definitely a coming-of-age theme on the new album. We’re asking ourselves: What am I looking to get out of life, out of being in a band? What joys do I want to pursue and where do I want to place my energy moving forward? We’ve come to the realization that we all need to stress less on the things we can’t control and enjoy more of what we have, what we can control and the journey itself.”
Waiting For Your Colours consists of ten tracks: Continental Drift; Team Wiped; Out For Me; Wasting Away; Drown; Burning Out; Losing Sleep; 22 Reasons; Kills The Loved, Haunts The Free; and Sakura.
Several of the songs have music videos on YouTube, including “Team Wiped”, “Out For Me”, and “Burning Out.”
Waiting For Your Colours is classic 90’s pop punk—reminiscent of bands like Blink-182, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan. The songs are full of bittersweet emotion, angst, and urgency. The super-relatable lyrics are an ode to the uncertainty and anxiety of young adulthood, and the struggle of finding your place in the world.
My favourite song on the album is probably “Out For Me,” a song that expresses the frustration of being stuck in a state of life that you’re unhappy with, with lyrics like, “Too much time spent chasing dreams/All my friends got what they need/But I’m barely scraping/Maybe one day I’ll break free/Escape the grip of poverty/But what I’ve come to learn is/Never bet on it.” Anyone who has ever experienced poverty, depression, or a combination of the two, knows the cycle of discouragement and negative thought patterns that come with it. I love that “Out For Me” doesn’t try to tell listeners that everything will be all right—they simply sit with us in that feeling of hopelessness.
While the album doesn’t have any acoustic tracks, the song “Kills the Love, Haunts the Free” is a slow, painful ballad that describes the heartache and grief of losing a loved one to cancer. It reminds me of “Untitled” by Simple Plan. I love the vulnerability of this song and I’m sure this will touch the hearts of everyone who hears it.
Overall, I seriously enjoyed Waiting For Your Colours.
Check out Chief State on Facebook.
