Cleopatrick - 'The Drake'
Canadian duo and NRM legends Cleopatrick are back with a gritty new single, titled The Drake. It’s fiery and acerbic — what more could we ask for?
After releasing Good Grief at the tail end of 2020 — an appropriately titled song, given the relief felt by everyone when that year finally ended — Cleopatrick have just released an anxiety-inducing power house of a track. Luke’s signature vocals are hazy, pleading, drowning in a sea of guitar distortion, while Ian’s drumming seems to only get louder and more insistent as the track goes on; a heart-palpitating tempo that leaves you breathless.
This sense of anxiety the song creates isn’t accidental — it’s a mirror of why the song even exists. According to Cleopatrick, the song is about a gig that they played at The Drake Hotel in Toronto in 2017, one of their first to a crowd of unfamiliar faces that had found them through the Internet. It was a nerve-inducing event, as anyone would expect, but it was a chance for them to grasp their inevitable futures as the brutally good band they are today. Until ‘The Boys’ turned up.
‘The Boys’, for anyone out of the loop, is the title of their 2018 EP. But that isn’t ‘The Boys’ I mean. I refer of course to that group. Everyone knows their town’s version. In this case, it was the group of assholes that had tormented the two in high school, the group that Cleopatrick had been trying to get away from. They’d turned up, presumably to try to leech off of the band’s newfound success. Ironic really, given that the band’s breakout track ‘hometown’ literally describes this: “Somehow they make it to all of my shows/ where can I go?”
The night ended in catastrophe, as this group started fights in the mosh pit and left Cleopatrick to look on from the stage, powerless to do anything but keep playing. The music video, meanwhile, is the exact opposite — a home-grown Cleopatrick basement gig, full of friends and unfiltered joy. In that way the song manages to regain any agency ever stolen from the two and coincidentally create a stupidly good song.
As well as that however, the song explores the pressures of being seen — of no longer having a safety net to fall back on, any sense of security and familiarity, and instead being thrust head first into it. The gradual swell of Luke’s implored ‘I’m gone’ throughout the song, his repeated cries getting all the more vocal, bring to mind almost a mantra to cope with the panic, until it suddenly boils over and explodes into a cacophonous beauty of pent up aggression. In that sense, then, the song becomes intimately familiar; that dark passenger in your head telling you you’re going to fail, and your own attempts at ignoring it and looking forward to the day you can leave your bullies behind, whether real or imagined.
Like Good Grief before, The Drake was produced in close friend Jig Dubé’s basement to try and inspire the next generation of New Rock Mafiosos with a process untainted by record labels or the selling out of ideals. Instead, it’s just a group of friends with some kit and a point to make. And what a point it’s turning out to be.
Words by James O’Sullivan