Video: PUP, ‘Kids’

Kevin Bronson on January 31st, 2019

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PUP are tried and true punk-rockers. The Toronto quartet (Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula and Steve Sladowski) come at you with slashing riffs, big power chords and shout-along vocals — the kind of stuff that leaves you either convulsing in anger or convulsing with laughter, or one right after the other. Their name is an acronym for Pathetic Use of Potential, which turned out to be ironic when weighed against their explosive 2016 album “The Dream Is Over.”

Their third album “Morbid Stuff” comes out April 5 and they announced it with the bleak, biting single “Kids,” which Babcock calls “a love song from one nihilistic depressive to another. It’s about what happens when you stumble across the only other person on the face of this godless, desolate planet that thinks everything is as twisted and as fucked up as you do.”

The “Kids” video has to rank as one of the most imaginative (not to mention full of humor and pathos) in recent memory. Directed by Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux, it imagines PUP in the year 2059, aging and apart. Chumak’s teenage daughter gives him attitude. Mykula drums on a downtown street. The technologically preserved Sladowski has a clothing line. Grathlar, the reptilian monster from their T-shirts, is running for president. And Babcock, who had been missing, has been found alive. Using “inter-cranial texting,” they talk about a reunion, and it happens. They had made a blood pact, after all. So there’s one last, um, gig.

“Jeremy cooked up this hilarious concept of what all of our lives would be like 40 years in the future,” Babcock says. “Our goal was to sorta set viewers up for this happy feel-good ending, and then at the last minute, crush them with darkness. Just like life in the present, most things in the future will probably turn out shit, or, if we’re really lucky, fine at best.”

||| Watch: The video for “Kids”