Some bands spend years trying to sound this direct. General Chaos got there by sixteen. “Busted,” the first single from the Montreal trio’s second LP “Can’t Please ’Em All” gets in, says its piece, and leaves a mark: fast downstrokes, a forward bass sound, drums that never loosen their grip, and a chorus built to be shouted back without thinking twice.
“Don’t wanna get caught but I got busted / Speak the words on my mind not gonna get silenced.” That line gives the song its tension. “Busted” is about consequence, but it runs on the idea that saying what you mean is still worth the trouble that follows.
General Chaos formed in 2022, when the band members were twelve, and came up through Montreal’s punk circuit playing Pouzza Fest and all-ages rooms across Quebec and Ontario.
Their debut LP “Outta My Way,” recorded with Ryan Battistuzzi, already showed they were past the point of being written off as a novelty. “Can’t Please ’Em All” sounds tighter, meaner in spots, and more sure of where it wants to go.
The album lands May 8 on Stomp Records. It was recorded in three days at Le Stuzzio, 4305 rue d’Iberville, with Battistuzzi handling recording and mixing, Fred Jacques of The Sainte Catherines producing, and Marc-André Beaudet on mastering.
Constantin Blondy plays guitar and sings, Aude Deniger is on bass and vocals, and Rémi Jacques plays drums. The record keeps things lean. Deniger’s basslines carry a lot of the motion, Jacques plays with real control, and Blondy knows when to keep a part clipped and when to let it bite. “This album is way better than the last one,” Blondy says. Half joke, but not really.
That confidence sits well in the context they come from. Montreal has a long history of bands keeping punk loud and self-sufficient, from The Nils and The Asexuals to Planet Smashers, Banlieue Rouge, and The Sainte Catherines. General Chaos fit into that line without sounding trapped by it.
This stuff doesn’t play like dress-up. It feels lived in. When La Presse profiled the band under the headline “Quand le punk carbure au Kool-Aid,” it caught that shift in plain terms: younger kids stepping into the tradition, older heads recognizing the handoff.
Across “Can’t Please ’Em All,” General Chaos take on political polarization, consumer culture, straight edge conviction, and the general stupidity of watching incompetent people make decisions for everyone else.
A few of those songs came with their own clear origin points. On “200 Yards,” Blondy says: “200 yards was written from scratch in one practice on September 10th. Charlie Kirk had just been shot and announced dead so the best way Rémi and I found to process the information was to write a song about it. The lyrics were written very quickly and represent the initial reaction and thoughts going through my mind at the moment.”
“Zipco” came out of Danny Lyon’s “The Bikeriders.” “It was so tempting to make a song out of some part of that book because it includes so many crazy cool interviews and stories about chicago bikers in the 60s from the view of a photographer,” Blondy says. “So I settled on Zipco’s anecdotes where he talks about his youth working on a shrimp boat and trying for the army.”
“The Idiots Have Taken Over” was written in one practice too, about two weeks before the band went into the studio. “It has little to no production from Fred,” Blondy says. “The lyrics are just straight emotion and thoughts about how literal incompetents and morons are making decisions. The first verse talks about what’s going on just south of where we live. The second verse focuses on how broken the public education system is in Montreal and Quebec.”
“Wilder Daze” goes after a different kind of trap. “Wilder Daze was the first song we ever wrote when Aude joined the band in early November of 2024,” Blondy says. “The lyrics talk about being shoved ads we don’t want to see and chemicals in our food without much of a choice but to pay more to avoid it. ‘If this school thing doesn’t work out, I’m going fucking wild’ basically means if I fail school, living alone in the woods is an option I’m fine with.”
For all that, “Busted” still makes the best introduction because it gets the balance right. It moves like a simple punk ripper, but there’s enough impatience in it to point toward the rest of the record.
The song is out now, with an official video already up, and “Can’t Please ’Em All” follows May 8 in digital, gatefold digipak CD, eco-graphite vinyl, eco-citrus vinyl, and a graphite-and-citrus double bundle.
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