There are punk records that make a noise, and there are punk records that leave a bruise. “Promise To Disappear” does the latter.
FakeYou might come from Montreal and they might be veterans of this game, but there’s nothing tired or routine about this at all. If anything, this thing feels wired, frayed and painfully alive. Lyrically, it lives in the aftermath of losing someone who once meant everything, and that ache runs right through the whole record. You hear it in “All About You”, a song that spirals through memory, madness and longing, but truth be told, that same haunted feeling is all over the album.
It helps, too, that there’s real pedigree here. The drummer’s past in The Sainte Catherines gives these songs a proper punk backbone, the sort that keeps everything grounded even when the emotions are threatening to spill over the edges. And they do. Often.
“Wanderlost” opens it up with punk from the dirt roads, the kind of thing Hot Water Music fans should absolutely be paying attention to. But it’s not just about the attack. It lands because it comes with a question that cuts deeper than most: “do you feel like you’re enough?” That’s not just a line. That’s the whole bloody record in miniature.
You can feel the catharsis surging through “Tieluck”, and by the time “All About You” rolls around, the static in the narrator’s head is practically crackling out of the speakers. This album is, in so many ways, a quest for peace that never quite arrives. It keeps reaching for it, keeps straining toward it, but the darkness keeps pushing back.
“100 Million Sheep” lasts just 190 seconds, but that’s enough time to let you inside the mind of someone who can’t sleep, whose thoughts race off into the worst possible corners. It’s uncomfortable because it feels true. FakeYou don’t dress these feelings up in metaphor and theatre. They just hand them over as they are.
Then “Like Helium Balloons” injects a bit more energy into the nihilism, which sounds like a contradiction until you hear it. The key line — “you would understand me if you knew what I’d been through” — is devastating, because it feels less like a lyric and more like a plea.
There’s ambition all over “Faded Scarf”, and a big old sound to the choruses too, but strip all that away and there’s heartbreak sitting underneath it, plain as day. That’s actually one of this record’s great strengths: for all the fizz, chug and forward motion, these songs are built around wounds that haven’t healed. “Solace” does exactly that as well. It moves, it crackles, it feels alive, but at its core there’s a line about “life in a black hole” that tells you everything you need to know.
“Midnight Sun” offers what feels like a brief silver lining, a tiny shaft of light through all the wreckage. But FakeYou aren’t interested in false comfort for long. “Spitshine” takes it away again, and the line “let’s pretend it never ends” is genuinely harrowing, precisely because it tries to hide all that pain behind something almost throwaway.
By the time “Following Protocol” closes things out with the suggestion that we’ve all got our names engraved on a bullet, there’s no pretending this is anything other than a record staring straight into the abyss and reporting back what it found there.
And that’s the beauty of “Promise To Disappear”. It is emotional without being mawkish, forceful without being blunt, and melodic without ever sanding off the edges. It sounds like a band who know exactly how to channel years of punk rock know-how into something that still feels raw enough to bleed.
FakeYou might be called FakeYou, but “Promise To Disappear” is very real indeed.
RATING 8/10
