Skydiving punks and YouTube as an archive: Crack Cloud on its fourth album’s visual universe

You might know the band Crack Cloud for a number of reasons; its polyphonic back catalogue, the fact its lead singer is also the drummer; the over-reported circumstances of its formation; or the way its stage performances are full of so many people whose faces always seem to be changing. What might have slipped by you, or has simply become an expected by-product of the band, is the brilliant, ever-inventive visual world accompanying Crack Cloud’s musical output.

The creative production of Crack Cloud’s fourth and most recent album, Red Mile, is mammoth. It includes music videos, an array of album artwork, a load of graphic ephemera and a series of tongue-in-cheek ads harking back to more ambiguous forms of advertising. This makes it all the more impressive that the band, and its wider ‘collective’, creates all of its visual material – and always has done. In a time where it’s much more common for bands to outsource creative work, this in-house approach has created a visual feeling that’s off-beat, authentic, and – most importantly – fun to make.

Here, Zach Choy the lead singer, drummer and founder of Crack Cloud and artist (could be described ‘creative director’) Aidan Pontarini, discuss this unique collaboration, touching on what it was like to work with a Hollywood stunt skydiver, how they’ve subverted the ‘code’ of punk, why they have so much love for YouTube, the rise of AI versus the regression of advertising and choosing the most ‘Walmart’-like image for the album’s front cover.

It’s Nice That: Tell us how you two met, and why you decided to collaborate on Red Mile?

Aidan Pontatini (AP):I never anticipated being a part of it [Crack Cloud] to this extent, it sort of just came naturally. I guess I was hanging out with you guys a lot and I went on tour – sort of as a member of the band – and then it just sort of grew from there?

Zach Choy (ZC):Yeah, we all just connected. I think that more often than not, these are how the collaborations unfold. It’s more time and place, and I often resort to fatalism to describe a lot of the bonds that are established through Crack Cloud. I just feel like there’s just energy that we put out there, and the way that it comes back, there’s just something natural about it. It’s not like email correspondence with someone that’s peripheral.

INT: From what I understand, Crack Cloud is a bit like a collective, it’s much bigger than just the band per se. Over the past decade, it’s changed quite a lot. Is that right?

ZC:Yeah, it’s changed quite a lot. I feel like the terminology ‘collective’ was a convenient way to describe the phenomenon of the group at the time in which we were using it. I’ve personally grown a bit more of a kind of ambivalence toward the group’s narrative and the way that it's described now, just because it has been so fluid. You see certain things in the press essentially become perpetuated in such a definitive way, and there’s something confounding about that when it comes to the description of the way that Crack Cloud sounds, and the way that it functions.

INT: What does Red Mile mark for Crack Cloud? How do you think the band’s evolved, both musically and creatively, from Tough Baby?

ZC: I think there was a lot of turbulence that we were experiencing on the road, as well as in our personal lives, plus the highs and lows of the past nine years, really, of just trying to maintain this unsustainable momentum and expectations. We felt a lot of exhaustion and ambiguity toward how we were spending our time – having one foot in the door with friends and family, and one foot in the door here. I think it’s a complicated, albeit common experience for any touring musician or anyone devoted to the arts. Instead of trying to ignore it, I think for the first time we really hit it head on, by way of really guarding ourselves at home and doing what we needed to do to reorient ourselves.

We felt like it was an opportunity for a paradigm shift, perhaps for us to actually lean into or listen to ourselves, listen to our bodies and our minds and our spirits, and listen to how tired we were, and lean into that kind of exhaustion as a sort of thesis for Red Mile. The desert [featured in the video The Medium] especially reinforced that kind of liminal space we were experiencing. Just the isolation and this kind of contract that we established between ourselves, where we would really work on music together in a room and give ourselves certain limitations that we haven’t before. Tough Baby and Pain Olympics took years to create, and we didn’t want to go down the same vortex.

INT: There’s obviously a punk influence running throughout the whole visual world of Red Mile, but it’s clearly not just a straight homage to the ‘genre’ or ‘movement’. For you, what does it signify and why does it play such a central role?

ZC: Well, you know, we all grew up in punk bands making punk music, playing in laundry mats and basements and it informed us. It’s what provided the kind of solidarity that I think I needed during the hardest of times, during my younger, angstier years. It’s timeless, and it's like potency, especially punk as an institution, and how it relates to disenfranchised youth.

As we’ve gotten older, I think we’ve become more disarmed to this other side of ourselves, where we do love melody and we do love texture and atmosphere. I think on the musician end of the spectrum, we really wanted to test ourselves with just more traditional songwriting leaning into a bit more of an affinity for pop. It was idealistic, and I don’t think we succeeded in making this totally positive, free-of-all-negativity kind of record. With the visuals, there’s definitely an element of subversion to it all. But I think that we were trying to find a marriage between these two dichotomies – punk and pop – that had always felt at odds with each other.

AP: I think this is probably the hairiest question because I’m coming at it from a different perspective than Zach, because I almost feel like punk is besides the point. The Medium, which the band had already written before I jumped on, is in reference to Marshall McLuhan’s Medium is the Message. With McLuhan, it’s all about how our environments shape us, so if we’re coming at it from punk, then we’re sort of a byproduct of punk. But one of the important things for me about this record, and its iconography, is that punk is really a vehicle to manipulate. I guess originally punk was this means of, like, scaring the system, but I feel like our use of it was more to... how do I say this?

ZC: Caricature comes to mind.

AP: Caricature, yeah. But it’s like, it’s more sincere than a caricature, too. I feel like with the McLuhanism it’s really about these media savvy slogans, and with the ads that we created for the album, it’s as if we’re we’re trying to reinterpret McLuhan’s media literacy as this new way of scaring the system. It’s this “live fast, die young” old punk trope, and then just reinterpreting that and trying to almost meme-ify it into this image of a skydiver getting cheap thrills.

INT: So, the sky diving footage for the Blue Kite video and the album cover, what was the first seed for this idea – how did you pull it off?

ZC: From a practical point of view, Aidan calls and says, “Hey, check this out.” I don’t think we really scrutinised it at all. It was just like, yes, okay, let’s figure this out. Then we found our guy.

AP: Basically the cinematographer, Craig O’Brien, who did some stunt cinematography for Mission Impossible, sort of fell into our lap. He’s like the go-to skydiver in Hollywood – it’s a very niche sport. But our friend was up to learn how to skydive and after a week of lessons, he was jumping out of a plane with Craig. It was pretty surreal because when I first pitched it to Zach it felt absurd, and after so many emails and us figuring out that we can actually do it, was one of those like, oh, fuck, we actually have to follow through with this now.

ZC: And then we all flew out in solidarity, met up and watched it all unfold in real time, over the course of an afternoon.

AP: The original conception of mine was just a still image of someone in free fall like that, sort of decontextualized almost somewhere between like a daydream and…

ZC: Like a Getty Image.

AP: Exactly, a Getty Image – just like an image. I think the first point of contention was wanting to mine this idea for more than just that. Frankly, it was just such an expensive project, and we were like, we need to get more than just a single image out of this. But the original idea was just a JPEG.

INT: How did it feel not knowing how it was going to turn out? Did you know it was going to be such good weather, or was it a total risk?

AP: When you’re an independent production it is quite existential. We’re so grateful that it was seamless. Craig was super enthusiastic about it, too. We’re very grateful that he was the one who was really able to actualise this image, because the original idea did come up as a sketch on a whiteboard that I drew. He managed to pin the composition on the first jump, which was really crazy. The image that we settled on [for the cover] is at the peak of this weird, uncanny thing. There are layers of peace in the expression and almost gratitude.

ZC: We joke about the image that we picked, because we had four dives worth of imagery, you know, hundreds of photos and we picked the ‘Warner Brothers’ image. Like this is the money shot! But there were other images that I think fulfilled the original vision more?

AP: Yeah, those have more of that spontaneous energy that I sort of preconceived. But we picked the ‘Walmart’ one for the release.

ZC: There’s something too perfect about it. Like, in the era of AI, I feel like it almost comes off as trivial? Because we got everything we wanted, and when you see something without blemishes, it feels like AI.

INT: That segues perfectly into my next question. On the Punk in Freefall video on YouTube, in brackets it says “slow motion, 4k, not AI”. I was intrigued as to whether you’d actually had someone think it was AI, or is that just a nod to the sentiment that you just talked about?

ZC: I love YouTube as this archival platform, and the way that technology and resolution and aspect ratio and media evolve on the platform. I feel like it’s a really fun vault, so we put it up for archival purposes. With all the art of Crack Cloud, I always just see these things as like photographs to put away in a dusty old scrapbook to dig up 30 years later, and just to have a bit of a tongue-in-cheek kind of context as to where we were. Because there is all of this conversation around AI and, it’s totally normalised now to flag something that is not made by a human. I’m not taking a jab at it, it’s just a sign of the times.

AP: Yeah, no jab. I love YouTube as an environment and I think we shape our tools, and our tools shape us – a nice little McLuhanism. I love the Punk in Free Fall video because it just feels like a little YouTube clip, and that’s it. I think really with the art direction, that’s something that Zach and I really bonded on and really leaned into. One of the best things to come from our collaboration was how easily those ads came to us. When the label was like we need some ads, and we were like “no” but then we were like: “Wait, okay, this would actually be a lot of fun.”

ZC: I think that there’s this existentialism associated with advertising now. The way that the grid has had such an adverse effect on our mental health, our general perception and how much imagery has become expendable. Growing up at the cusp of the 20th century through the 1990s, we have this nostalgia for a different kind of advertising, or just the way that the medium was utilised. It seemed like there was a lot of love and excitement, even with children’s programming. These are mediums that can be very artistic, and can be these vehicles to communicate benevolent or thought-provoking ideas. But it seems that there is just kind of this general regression to a style of advertising that favours easy clicks and algorithmic inclinations.

INT: The Medium video jumps to a lot of different locations, but what stands out is the attention to detail and the art direction; the graphics, the posters, the ephemera, like the newspaper that's featured. How do you go about sort of creating all these aspects?

ZC: It was a grind. We all flew out to Vancouver, which is where we were established for many years. It’s where a lot of our infrastructure still exists, so we chose to film there just based on familiarity. A few of us showed up 72 hours in advance, and – as with every video production we do – it’s very immersive and we have a lot of fun, running around, riffing on details. Aidan did a lot of preparation in terms of the artefacts interspersed throughout; wheat pasting the newspaper, certain outfits and the pop letters. There’s a lot of curation that goes on well in advance. Then it’s just a scramble to put it all together.

AP: There’s a lot of improvisation once you’re on set. There’s no storyboard. We had a few ideas for shots, but it’s basically just like, hey, here’s the context. Let’s invent something here now.

INT: It does look like it was a lot of fun to make.

AP: It was so much fun. Things just sort of happened. Zach and I found that laundromat location the day before, and there’s a farmer with some sheep that we had gotten in touch with because we knew we wanted this image of punks with sheep. One image that didn’t make it into the video was us eating grass imitating the sheep.

ZC: I think the process in and of itself is something that we value very much. Over the years I’ve learned to not overlook that. Every time we get together I would liken it to a family reunion, or a marriage even. Often it’s an inclination for a group to outsource when it comes to music videos and when it comes to any kind of more complex production, because of the amount of work that it takes. You know, sometimes I’ll watch our videos and there’s a certain naivety to the way that we’re interfacing with the medium because we don’t have the technical backgrounds, we’ve kind of just learned as we’ve gone. It evokes this infamous director from the early 1950s called Ed Wood who didn’t know what he was doing – his productions were always disasters, but there was just this community that orbited around them. I really cherish that we have that, that we have the community to be able to do these things. Regardless of the technical, I can guarantee that we’re going to achieve something great. So when I watch our videos, that’s kind of what I see on top of the subtext. It’s just like, the spirit of it, isn’t it?