Milk St. made a good chunk of “Good Grief” in front of people before they knew exactly what the songs were going to become. In 2024 they played more than 120 shows, and “Just So”, “ToyotaCorolla”, “Milk and Honey”, “Boy Dinner” and “Slide Off” kept changing in the set. One night at The Garage, a DIY venue in Maryland, the loose instrumental ending of “Just So” suddenly picked up the line “Oh Joni, I’m So Sorry”. The “Getting Freaky Now, Getting Creepy Now” section in “Toyota Corolla” arrived in much the same way.
We are premiering Matthew Meunier’s video for “Toyota Corolla” today, a day before the single is released.
“Just So” came out May 7, the title track followed August 27, and “Good Grief” arrives September 25 with 13 songs that were written, pulled apart, tested live and kept loose for longer than Jonah Wakefield had allowed himself on the band’s earlier records. Other songs were worked out onstage too, just less often, and some of the record came together in living rooms right before the next run of shows.
“Ya in 2024 we played over 120 shows,” Jonah said. “The whole ending to Just So with ‘Oh Joni, I’m So Sorry,’ came out randomly at a show at a DIY venue called The Garage in Maryland and was originally just an instrumental, noodly guitar part. The ‘Getting Freaky Now, Getting Creepy Now,’ part in Toyota Corolla came out in that sort of same way.”
“Toyota Corolla” is guitar-led and keeps opening up into bigger riffs as it goes, with Cade Earick adding saxophone and Jordan Kernan on backing vocals. The song keeps returning to the idea of being shaped into somebody else’s preferred version of you. Its central joke is plain enough: “In your head I am a Limousine / I always thought I was more of a Toyota Corolla.” Jonah wrote it during one of his morning sessions at the kitchen table, coffee on hand, reading and putting records on before writing. It came out of the post-college mess of trying to work out who he was and who his partners expected him to be.
One lyric changed with him. “Cover me up with the cool kids in the magazines” started out as “Cool Kids in the local scene”. At the time, Jonah was frustrated by cliques in some of the local scenes Milk St. passed through, especially the habit of people showing up for friends because the room conferred a bit of cool by association. His view softened as the band kept travelling, and the lyric did too.
“I was super frustrated by some local scenes we’d tread in being clique and this phenomenon where people would come out to see their friends play to feel cool by association, and not just being there for music and community,” he said. “But as some of my opinions on those kinds of things shifted, I think they naturally started coming out differently.”
Matthew Meunier filmed, edited and directed the new video, and co-produced it with Jonah. Matt Hinds plays Paul Bunyan, Cade Earick is Sax Guy, Holly Mae Higgins is Cool Hat Girl and Helena De Martin is Moon Girl. Jonah sings and plays guitar, Harry Burns handles drums, backing vocals and lead guitar, Gabe Chambers plays bass, Jordan adds backing vocals, and Cade plays saxophone. The song was written by Milk St., produced by the band with Cade, recorded and mixed by Cade, and mastered by Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering.
Jonah has called “Good Grief” the most naturally occurring record Milk St. have made. He stopped comparing every unfinished song with the bands he loved, started meditating, got more confident as a songwriter and quit asking friends for reactions while the songs were still forming. He also kept more of the first lyrical impulses that came out in songs and poems, leaving bigger decisions for the recording and post-recording stages.
“With the last record, I was so anxious about writing and everything that it was even hard to listen to bands that I loved because I was like ‘damn why can’t I do something like that,’” Jonah said. He began saving the big questions for later. “I actually stopped showing friends and people new songs I was working on and that helped a lot of the second guessing too. Being like ‘heres how this song goes I’m working on,’ subconsciously cemented the feeling of this is how the song ought to be and sort of stopped me from keeping it loose.”
Once an unfinished song had been shown around, Jonah would start treating that version as fixed. On “Good Grief“, he tried to keep an almost empty-headed relationship with the songs and put less emotional weight on each early decision. Some lyrics caught him off guard. “Sometimes I was even shocked at what sort of naturally would come out and would be like ‘OH THAT’S what I’ve been feeling that I’ve been having trouble putting into words.’”
Touring also meant much of this happened in a 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan. Jonah had wanted a van and a band since he was about 13, and when Milk St. started touring hard, the used Grand Caravan was what he could afford. It had around 120,000 miles when he bought it and 295,000 when it finally stopped running two years later.
For a couple of years they spent more time in it than at home, to the point that being home could feel odd. Jonah kept repairing it every time something went wrong because, by then, the van had become part of the routine. They travelled with disposable cameras so everybody could take pictures without spending the whole day looking at a phone. The photos are still in his bedside table.
“It really felt like an old friend that got us wherever we wanted it to go, and whenever it broke down, I never second guessed fixing it as opposed to buying something else,” Jonah said. “Even though we still continue to tour in the same ways, that whole time period feels like a really romantic dream of a movie, and that van and the pictures really make it real for me.”
Jonah remembers Harry and Gabe piling into the minivan and going from Toronto to Colonel Sanders’ grave and back. He had wanted that exact life when he was a kid: write music, travel, hang out with his best friends and keep moving.
Milk St. go back to 2018, when Jonah was still working under the name Spaced in Bangor, Maine, the city most people outside the state know through Stephen King. They officially formed in 2022 around Jonah in Maine’s DIY and house-show scene, with his long-time friends Gabe on bass and Josh Whittemore on drums. Their early demo tapes became the debut album “Spaced”. Josh later stepped down from drums to put more time into the local scene, and Harry joined.
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The band have sometimes put “Hardcore Soft Rock” on the tin. It is a decent shorthand for their folk-punk and indie-rock base, with harder and stranger turns left open. “V3RM0NT” followed in 2023.
The next stretch put them on bills with Rent Strike, Sister Wife Sex Strike and Pigeon Pit, plus sold-out shows around New England and runs that took them from Maine to Toronto and down to Florida. In 2024 they released the “Oscar Meyer Winners” split with Brooklyn artist Brook Pridemore, then “Floral/Slide Off” with Seattle band Sinking Season later that year.
Gabe recorded bass on “Good Grief” before turning more of his attention to other projects in Maine. During 2025, Jonah and Harry kept working on the songs with new touring bassist Jordan Kernan.
Across the album credits, Jonah sings and plays guitar and lead guitar, Harry plays drums, backing vocals and lead guitar, Gabe adds bass, backing vocals and lead guitar, Cade adds piano, saxophone and lead guitar, and Jordan sings backing vocals. Milk St. and Cade produced the album. Cade and Jonah recorded and mixed it, Justin mastered it at Mystery Room Mastering, Miranda Haws made the artwork and Sara Whitty edited it. Press photos are by Mackenzie Trikouros.
The looser acoustic strum and crooked guitar writing can carry a Violent Femmes or Pavement pull. “Toyota Corolla” opens into bigger riffs with some of the untidy Flaming Lips energy associated with “Clouds Taste Metallic”. “Boy Dinner” has a more direct Joyce Manor connection, “Milk and Honey” has a bright guitar movement that can bring Supergrass to mind, and “Ronkonkoma” runs on a break and shuffle with some of The Front Bottoms’ forward motion. “Slide Off” pushes further into fuzz and distortion than the band’s earlier acoustic-leaning stuff. “And So On” closes the record as a lullaby-like waltz.
“Henry” is the short audio recording that opens the album before “Just So” comes in.
“Just So” was one of the first songs from this period. Jonah knew he was overwhelmed and depressed, but the details had not settled into clear language yet. The song began with a random voice-memo riff he had no plan to use. Harry and Gabe started messing with parts around it and the song clicked. Later, while Jonah’s family was splitting up and his father was struggling mentally, the writing got even more direct.
“While dealing with my family splitting up and my father struggling mentally, I dissociated and kept writing, but all that came out was ‘I feel sad.’ The chorus, ‘Why are you so sad all the time,’ was me mocking myself.”
The final “Oh Joni” section came later at The Garage, straight out of the live version.
“Toyota Corolla” came from Jonah’s morning writing routine and his post-college identity mess. It is full of attempts to become the person somebody else wants, from eye contact and handshakes to buying a house and trying like hell. The “cool kids” lyric changed as his own view of local scenes changed, and the “Getting creepy now, getting freaky now” break was another live accident that stayed.
“Boy Dinner” arrived after hernia surgery, when Jonah was stuck at his mother’s place and reading a lot of Jack Kerouac. He and Gabe had also been listening heavily to Joyce Manor. The lyrics started with Jonah watching his best friend deal with OCD and different coping habits. Some of Gabe’s behaviour bothered him because he recognised versions of himself in it. “Cigarettes and coffee” belongs directly to Gabe, and the title grew out of Jonah seeing how their habits and struggles kept echoing each other.
“Slide Off” had been following Jonah around since he was 17 or 18. He tried to use the idea in several bands and projects and it never quite worked. During the “Good Grief” period it finally did. The song is about breathing through a bad stretch and letting some of the weight go, with fuzz and heavier distortion taking over from the more acoustic base heard on earlier Milk St. recordings.
“Milk and Honey” comes from the same relationship period as “Montana”. Jonah and his partner were trying to get back together after a breakup, and the original voice memo catches him sobbing and screaming the repeated “I guess” opening. The finished song keeps the touring life right inside the relationship, with parking lots, random living rooms and promises to people back home rubbing against an attempt to hold things together.
“Good Grief” was written two days before the band went into the studio, just after Gabe told Jonah he was leaving. It deals with an abortion experienced by Jonah and a partner, the dissociation around it and what Jonah has described as bliss mixed with confusion. He has talked about literally flushing it, thinking the moment was over, then having the emotional weight keep resurfacing. The track starts with a vinyl-scratch sample before moving into one of the record’s bluntest lines about masculinity, money and uncertainty.
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“Apple Pie” came out of another stretch of forced stillness. After hernia surgery Jonah could barely walk for around a month. He was also looking back at a relationship in which he felt responsible for hurting somebody. The song sits with that guilt and self-blame while he is physically stuck in place.
“Weed and Crisco” started with Jonah mishearing a section near the end of Modest Mouse’s “The Lonesome Crowded West”. He heard the melody and harmony wrong, kept the wrong version in his head and built a new song from it. The lyrics go after his relationship with his father, religion and the hypocrisy Jonah saw around faith.
“God’s Dog” was written the same day. Jonah had stopped believing. His father still had his faith, and Jonah kept the contradictions he saw in that faith and in their relationship in the song. The image is a dog trapped in a hot car, with nowhere useful to put all that suffocation.
“Montana” belongs to the breakup period that also produced “Milk and Honey”. Jonah was angry, confused and watching himself behave in ways he did not recognise. The lyrics keep pulling between leaving and staying, and they put the van right into the middle of it: living out of it, watching roads pass, trying to work out what kind of person he was becoming.
“Ronkonkoma” was the last song written before the studio. It arrived much faster than most of the record. Jonah’s reaction was basically, “This is a song. Let’s do it.” They then spent five days in the studio pushing it through several takes. The lyrics are full of touring details: stolen food, plastic forks, hardwood floors, expensive New York gas, a van that keeps breaking and a credit card Jonah hopes his mother does not hear about. The ending pulls phrases from “Milk and Honey”, “Weed and Crisco”, “Just So” and “Montana” back into the song before the train keeps stopping at Ronkonkoma. Jonah also gets in the line “you know we care so damn much” before leaving again.
“And So On” came after the rest of the album had already been recorded. Jonah wrote and tracked it during mixing, at a point when he thought the worst of the family crisis had passed. More happened involving his siblings and he felt beaten down again. The waltz closes with family memories and anger that never quite cancels the love underneath them.
Gabe had moved on to focus on other projects, Jordan had joined the touring lineup, and Jonah had learned to leave a song alone long enough for it to surprise him. On earlier records, Jonah made decisions earlier about which songs and parts belonged. He let “Good Grief” stay messy longer.
“With our other records, we very much had a ‘vibe’ or concept of how it ought to sound and spent a lot of time being like ‘oh this song works or this one doesn’t’. Good Grief, as a record, is probably the most naturally occurring piece of art we’ve made so far. The songs sort of came out in waves super naturally, and with us touring as much as we were, we would really hash them out on stage and try them out to all the different audiences each night.”
Milk St. have since moved from Maine to New Hampshire, partly to shorten the drives between tours. They are planning more US and Canadian dates through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. The old Grand Caravan is gone. The disposable-camera photos are still in the bedside table.
Milk St. are taking “Good Grief” back on the road straight after release.
Their album release run has already started with shows in Manchester and Orono, with the next stretch kicking off September 26 in Biddeford and running down the East Coast through Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, South Carolina and Maryland. There is also an October 29 date still waiting on a location, plus a Halloween show in Boyds, Maryland with the address available by DM. The current run wraps November 21 at SoMe Fest in Kittery, Maine.
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September 26 – Biddeford, ME – @birdy420666
September 27 – Portsmouth, NH – The Press Room
October 17 – Portland, ME – Bayside Bowl
October 23 – Boston, MA – Warehouse XI
October 24 – New Brunswick, NJ – The Gallery
October 25 – Montclair, NJ – Meatlocker
October 26 – Asbury Park, NJ – The Wonder Bar
October 27 – Philadelphia, PA – LBP
October 28 – Washington, DC – Pie Shop
October 29 – TBD
October 30 – Charleston, SC – Stuart’s House
October 31 – Boyds, MD – secret location, DM for address
November 21 – Kittery, ME – SoMe Fest
