VEAL EMBARK ON 2024 TOUR ACROSS CANADA

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“Hot Loser” re-released on Six Shooter Records, now available online.

The thing about Veal is we never broke up. We finished touring The Embattled Hearts in 2003 and then we just didn’t call each other for a couple decades. Nik was busy with Shout Out Out Out Out and Chang would emerge occasionally—usually spotted in my mom’s kitchen in Winnipeg.

“Hey Twinkles, should me and your son play any more dumb rock shows or no? Are we having coffee?”

I’d get a report from the prairies that he was looking good for the disgruntled pirate that he was (is) but mostly I assumed we’d probably never play again.

But now it’s been 20 years and whatever PTSD we’d developed from seven years touring three albums in a rusted GM Safari has faded into the rearview mirror and the people involved are mostly foreign to us now. I read over the lyrics and I can remember the kid who wrote them.

His nihilism and passionate conviction that EVERYONE IS DOING IT WRONG (whatever *it* is) informed the kinds of acerbic missives that filled our soundtrack to the late 90’s. Reality Bites, after all (Of course we named ourselves after the flesh of a calf — prematurely wrested from its mother to be exploited — devoured — by the whims of pop culture circa 1999. Did we really see ourselves that way? Probably not entirely. We just wanted to be like the Meat Puppets).

We played some songs in a dank Winnipeg basement this past November to see if they’d inspire rage or a more charmed nostalgia.

We’re going on tour this spring and re-releasing our first record (also recorded in a dank basement) because nostalgia trumped rage—by a hair. It’s been twenty years—27 since we recorded Hot Loser. I still have my old Harmony H75 too. Bring earplugs.

Xo
Luke

 Photos by Cora-Lea Kropielnicki.