There’s this Lee Bains + the Glory Fires record from 2022 called Old-Time Folks that Luke Ottenhof keeps coming back to these days. Bains is from Birmingham, Alabama, and his songs—anarcho-Skynyrd punk-rock, as Ottenhof puts it—tell stories of resistance and solidarity from the American south.
What stuck with the Brickie frontman was the album’s central idea: that wherever we are, people have always struggled to make the world kinder, and we’re connected to that lineage whether we realize it or not.”It’s a little daunting, but mostly, I think it’s comforting, this idea that we’re not alone in our struggle, and we never have been,” Ottenhof explains. “Beyond that fact, I arrive often at another set of thoughts: How obtuse and self-centered it is to presume that we are the only ones struggling against the horrors of the world; how invigorating it is to place our existence in the context of a community engaged in a millenia-long fight; how freeing it is to accept that we will likely die before any of this gets better.”
He was thinking about those things when he wrote the songs on III, Brickie’s new EP dropping February 6th. The Montreal four-piece—Ottenhof on vocals and guitar, Dario Campellone on guitar, Stéphane Turmel on bass and vocals, and Ben Evans on drums—started out chasing the sound of Wisconsin punk band Tenement, aiming for something catchy but also gnarly, intense, confrontational. Ottenhof’s always been moved by John K. Samson’s writing in the Weakerthans too, that kindness and faith in the lyrics. Not religious faith, but “a ‘this world is indeed a beautiful place filled with meaning’ way.”
Committing to that worldview feels nearly impossible most days, Ottenhof admits. “More often than not, it feels impossible to exist here, at this moment, in anything other than a dizzy state of revulsion and fury,” he writes.
The litany of horrors is relentless—police violence in Minneapolis, crushed bodies of Palestinian children, unhoused people brutalized in freezing cold, Indigenous lands destroyed by extraction industries, progressive politicians union-busting with legislation instead of actual pigs like they did a century ago. Then there’s the comfortable people in their $80,000 electric vehicles making fortunes off “green” tech while displaced people get scorned. AI and streaming services and LiveNation swallowing up human artistic expression and shitting it out in warped shreds. Music reduced to a dogfight for eyeballs and nickels slipping from the pockets of soulless industry fat cats.
But also. “See your friends,” Ottenhof counters. “See a stranger at a show in real life, then at another, then another, and then say hello to them. See the band, loud and crude and fast, who have spent untold hours in a room with one another, working toward this sound that they are blasting out to not just your ears, but your chest, your arms, your fingers, your feet, your eyes.” See spring buds under a cold blue sky turning into impossibly complex leaves. See the bugs crawling across your floor and leave them be, see yourself in them, see the whole world in them. See Sunday morning sun split by a gemstone into sixty dots of multicolored glory. See the horror, yeah, but see the magic too—not because you believe in it yet, but because you have to, to keep surviving this mess.
Shirley Jackson wrote that “no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” Ottenhof’s trying to find ways to escape those conditions.
“If you hold these ideas in a certain way—if you can make peace with the conviction that, yes, the world is a fucking deranged cruel bloodbath, but it’s also overflowing with tenderness and wonder—it can almost feel like a spirit moving with you,” he says. Like diehard Christians finding purpose in everything around them, except without all the weird shit that comes with that particular fanaticism. “Some extremely earnest ‘cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see them’-type shit.”
Those are the feelings he kept wrestling with while writing these four songs. He wanted to reject the self-indulgence of despair and the self-importance of preachy proselytizing. Just simple, blunt things that said exactly what he meant. A way to connect with people feeling the same things. Some noise to contribute to the struggle.
III was self-recorded at the local by Alex Guimond, JF Nadeau, Ottenhof, and Turmel, with drums and vocals tracked at Direkt-in Studios. JF Nadeau handled the mixing, Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios mastered it. The result is four songs spanning roughly ten minutes—a breakneck blast through an overthinker’s commitment to finding beauty and agency amid chaos. It celebrates tiny joys like connections with friends, sounds, bugs, and non-hungover Sundays, while exploding with rage at eco-capitalism and live-streamed genocide in Gaza.
The band dropped the first single “Sunday Forever” last week and today they are celebrating the February 6th release with a show at P’tit Ours in Montreal, with more dates booked through spring 2026 in Ottawa, Québec, and Saguenay, plus an Ontario trip in the works.
“I don’t have it all figured out,” Ottenhof admits. “I wrestle with these things and contradict myself every other day. This is a reminder to keep trying. It’s a weird thing, trying to express in sound and word how it feels to be alive in this moment. But trying to do that, and trying to do it with friends who feel the same way, is one of the most wonderful, heartening things I’ve ever done. It’s also insanely fucking fun, and everyone should do it. Everyone should make really loud, messy guitar music to jump around to with friends. This, too, is a lineage. Step into it. Make a joyful, angry noise.”
III is out February 6th via Bandcamp.
