Cola Find the Melody on Cost of Living Adjustment
The Montreal trio's third album trades some of the old deadpan for real tunes, reverb-heavy guitars and a drummer who argues with his own samples.
Cola have spent two albums being described as the band that came out of Ought. On their third, Cost of Living Adjustment, that framing finally runs out of use. The record came out May 8 on Fire Talk, and its title is a quiet joke: spell out the initials and you get the band's own name, a way of making a self-titled album without calling it one (Bandcamp; DIY). It is the most melodic thing Tim Darcy has fronted, and the first Cola record that could win over someone who never heard Ought.
Three players, one room
The lineup is unchanged: Darcy on vocals and guitar, Ben Stidworthy on bass and guitar, and Evan Cartwright, who also drums for U.S. Girls, on drums, guitar, organ and synth. The band arranged and produced the album themselves at Studio Mixart in Montreal's NDG neighbourhood, with Valentin Ignat engineering and mixing and Harris Newman mastering (Bandcamp; Paste). That self-reliance shows. Nothing here is overdressed; the extra color comes from reverb and a few synth layers rather than strings or guest vocalists. The one outside hand is Bryce Cloghesy, who adds synth to the opener "Forced Position" and wrote the chorus bassline on the closer (Bandcamp).
Cartwright is the record's engine. On "Hedgesitting," the lead single, he plays live drums against a sampled hip-hop loop, and the two patterns pull at each other while Stidworthy keeps the low end tight (Paste; Rolling Stone Canada). The guitars over the top are gauzy and shoegaze-adjacent, closer to Ride than to Gang of Four. "Haveluck Country" locks a terse guitar figure to a four-on-the-floor kick, then lets the bridge go slack on purpose (Paste).
Darcy sings now
The biggest change is the voice. Darcy's half-spoken paranoid monotone, the trait that made Ought sound like Ought, is mostly retired. DIY hears him moving away from Mark E. Smith territory toward something closer to Stephen Malkmus, still dry but carrying actual melodies (DIY). Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone points to the closer, "Skywriter's Sigh," as an early-Smiths homage, a Morrissey-style croon over a jangling, slightly skewed guitar line (Rolling Stone Canada). It works because Darcy does not oversell it. The croon sits a little behind the beat, a man trying on a costume he knows is slightly too big.
That restraint pays off most on "Conflagration Mindset," which Sheffield calls the album's high point, a disarmingly pretty tune with dread running under it (Rolling Stone Canada; Bandcamp). The title is hard to separate from biography. Darcy lost his home in the Los Angeles wildfires in early 2025, and DIY reads the album's turn toward community and away from late-capitalist self-interest partly through that loss (DIY). The song does not narrate the fire. It just sounds like someone singing calmly in a room that is getting warmer.
Where it slips
Eleven songs at roughly 45 minutes is the right size, but the middle stretch spreads thin across modes (Bandcamp). Paste lists them: "Third Double" goes shoegaze, "Much of a Muchness" is plain upbeat indie rock, "Satre-torial" revisits the old Ought post-punk wiring, and "Favoured Over the Ride" is power-pop with a sing-along chorus (Paste). Each is fine. Together they play like a band demonstrating range rather than building a sequence, and "Satre-torial," with its fashion-world satire, is the one moment where the old archness returns without the new warmth.
- Start with: "Conflagration Mindset," "Hedgesitting," "Skywriter's Sigh"
- Skip on a first pass: "Satre-torial"
- For fans of: Ride, early Smiths, Mission of Burma
The verdict
Critical reception has been warm across the board; Paste gave it a B+ and DIY four stars (Paste; DIY). Yet the album still sits outside most year-end conversation, showing up in places like Uproxx's mid-year list of under-the-radar indie records rather than the big tallies (Uproxx). That is a shame. Cost of Living Adjustment is the sound of a band dropping its defensive irony without dropping its intelligence, and its best songs are the most open-hearted thing anyone from this Montreal lineage has made.
Rating: 8/10