Chastity is for the skids, the headbangers, the freaks. Chastity is for everyone who has suffered and survived the lethal combination of suburban overculture and mental distress. Chastity is especially for everyone who didn’t survive—the ones who didn’t get out. Brandon Williams did, luckily, and his work with Chastity has been to collect people like him, who got out by the skin of their teeth.
On Chastity’s upcoming, self-titled fourth record, there is no such distance: Williamsdecided to write a fully non-fiction work — about struggle, death, despair, redemption, darkness, and light—but this time, the songs ascend to new depths of intensity and desperation, new heights of resolution and power.
“It’s really about the first nosedive that I did as a young person,” says Williams. “It’s a record about struggle, about the missing years. It’s also a thank you to some people in my life.”
The record hurtles through melodic hardcore, shoegaze, and emo, all magnificently and enormously rendered thanks to slick work from John Paul Peters (Propagandhi, Comeback Kid), who engineered and mixed the record, bringing to life a beautiful and affirming ending to it’s closer, centered on the band’s first and enduring idea: life is less shitty if we live it together.