Editor’s Note: Welcome to Quarantainment, Vanyaland’s new series on what to watch, what to hear, and how to deal as the world engages in social distancing to combat the spread of coronavirus, or COVID-19. We’re all at home, we’re all online, and we’re all in this together. #StayTheFHome
Boston garage-rock trio Square Ape have a pretty good message for all of us struggling in this age of self-quarantine: “Remember the process. It’s just a long weekend.”
That long-weekend mentality brings us into Monday (March 30), and today vocalist-guitarist Dug McCormack’s new project, rounded out by drummer Kevin Kupillas and bassist John McKusick, release a new EP titled process. It’s 14 riff-filled minutes of pent-up frustration let loose from its cage, recorded with Will Holland at Charlestown’s Chillhouse Studios.
“The album itself is a ‘relationship’ album, focusing on relationships, with death, ourselves, others, love, and how we see ourselves,” McCormack tells Vanyaland. “We all have a process of moving forward that we have applied to our lives that has got us to this point, it is not always a pretty one, but we must remember that process.”
McCormack adds: “We were somewhere before we arrived here, and we need to remember that.”
Last week, Square Ape teased the new EP by releasing a video for the track “WHY US”, and McCormack says that while he wrote the song back in 2002, it made sense in 2020 as a Square Ape garage rock banger.
“The mess we are currently in lines up pretty well,” he says. “The lyrics are as follows: “I wanna be a doctor in a medical lab / To find out how to cure it / Killed millions and more everyday / Also called the destroyer / Why us?Why here? Why now? / Why are we so vulnerable, to stupidity.”
Crank up the video and the EP below. And trust the process.