True to the untamed Canadian ethos, Born Ruffians chafe at categorization. Over the past dozen or so years, they’ve ramped up, polished and generally tampered with their hooky indie-rock sound, reaching a sublime sort of classic-rock-inspired peak with 2020/21’s three-album, beverage-inspired Juice, Squeeze and Pulp.
Giving fans four years to process that 26-song trilogy, the prolific Ontario outfit now unveils Beauty’s Pride (Yep Roc), which goes all in on the electronic and experimental elements they’d only toyed with in the past. Produced by Roger Leavens and mixed by Gus Van Go (Stills, Arkells, Beaches), it’s the first Born Ruffians album to feature the band’s newest member, keyboardist Maddy Wilde. “Her fingerprints are all over this album,” says singer/guitarist Luke LaLonde.
LaLonde—with one assist from Wilde—disassembles and examines Beauty’s Pride below.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “What A Ride”
“It all starts in a tattoo parlor at one in the morning, an impulsive time to get permanently marked with ink—and the narrator is having second thoughts. They reassure themselves that flesh isn’t permanent, so they might as well draw some stuff on it because, at some point, it’s going to rot off their dead bones. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, ‘Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!”’”
2) “Let You Down”
“It’s not unreasonable to be held prisoner in your mind. I know I’m prone to patterns of thought that get so worn in they become trenches that are hard to escape from. Sometimes I need someone to look down, see me there and pull me out. I’m writing to my love—my wife—who pulls me up so effortlessly with the strength of an Olympian.”
3) “Athena”
“I was writing about why Athena, goddess of war, would be interested in online discourse and stuff like that. I’m begging Athena to take it easy on me. Sometimes there’s a real carrot and stick—a never-ending search for fulfillment in life. The point is to perpetuate desire in an endless ouroboros. This is a fun groove we came up with together. Maddy’s descending keyboard line over Mitch (DeRosier’s) groovy bass part propelled the song in the studio before I had any lyrics.”
4) “Beauty’s Pride”
“This song was written for my son, Lewie, who makes his debut at the end of the track. I had the album title long before Lewie was even a consideration, but he came to represent everything this title evoked. The song is about love bigger than you knew possible and the endless capacity of the human heart to grow and hold more and more love.”
5) “Can We Go Now”
Wilde: “I’m usually the first person to initiate a game or some sort of dance-party/improv situation at an event. But if I lose steam, I’m immediately ready to go, and my patience goes out the window. It’s such an exhausting feeling to be in a group setting when you’re bored—especially if your ride home wants to stay. Realizing, ‘That was it. The best has come and gone. What now?’”
6) “Do”
“This song came into my head in full when I was walking my dogs. To represent the moment between knowing and actually doing, I wanted the verses to bring that mixture of determination, calmness and tension found in Broadcast’s music—and for the choruses to have the explosiveness of any of the fine maximalist composers. Roger brought out his modular synth and created some walls of sound to rival Prokofiev.”
7) “Hi”
“’Hi’ was written during the recording process, so it was one of the last songs to be added. It’s about that moment in time when you feel yourself fall into those deep, squishy feelings of a crush. It’s about love found and love renewed.”
8) “Mean Time”
“Nabokov says that ‘our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ ‘Mean Time’ is sort of autobiographical/speculative nonfiction inspired by Nabokov’s beautiful autobiography Speak, Memory. It’s about those two black voids—the before and the after—and all the extraordinary moments in between. I had a lot of extra verses that had to be pared down to make this song work. It came out musically and lyrically in a big rush, and I initially didn’t envision it for the band because the instrumentation was so different from what we normally do. I built everything around synth and drum samples. I showed it to the band, and it became the thesis statement for Beauty’s Pride, summing up a lot of the lyrical themes around the big life moments I was going through during that time as my wife was pregnant with our first child.”
9) “Mean Time 2”
“This was written before Mean Time and renamed as number two because of where it fell in the album sequence. That big, old, mean time just keeps marching on. Life’s expectations freefall so slowly, like the alabaster trickle of a snowflake. I’m out there melting in the busy streets. I’m in the mean time … that big, old, mean time.”
10) “Supersonic Man”
“A sci-fi short story about a humanoid alien arriving on earth—which also works as a metaphor for childbirth. My wife was pregnant with our first child through a lot of my writing for Beauty’s Pride, and he was born while we were recording and mixing the album, so his presence is all over the songs. In “Supersonic Man,” I’m picturing him like Kal-El before he was Superman, hurtling toward Earth in his space pod.”
11) “To Be Seen”
“This is a combination of two songs I wrote in 2020 that were intended for acoustic guitar and put into a pile of music I designated as solo material. I basically smashed the best parts of the two songs together, plugged in my electric guitar and played it with Mitch and (drummer) Steve (Hamelin). The song carries a strong message of resiliency through dark times. Every hard day slips away in the night. It’s about the power of feeling seen by another person or entity and the difficulty many of us feel in searching for that.”
12) “All My Life”
“I brought out this guitar part one late winter night in 2022 while we were in the studio with (Juice, Squeeze and Pulp producer) Graham Walsh. He sat in on the piano, and we recorded the instrumental part in one or two takes. I sat with the song as an instrumental for some time until my wife became pregnant. I felt like my entire life had been leading to the moment of my son’s birth, and the rest of my life would be dedicated to being there for him.”
