Calgary's Self-Cut Bangs release third album with Fleetwood Mac energy, minus the chaos

Self-Cut Bangs, the Calgary indie duo of Shawn Petsche and Cayley O'Neill (now Petsche), released their third album Growth Spurts on Wednesday—and it sounds like a band entering a new chapter.

Formed in March 2020 as a pandemic-era apartment project, Self-Cut Bangs built their reputation on monster guitar riffs and sticky hooks that sounded nothing like isolation-era lockdown music should. Their self-titled debut arrived loud, fast, and brash. The second album, Circle Around the Free, followed a similar template: big energy, infectious melodies, real world held at bay.

Growth Spurts signals something different. The album carries that same hallmark sound—the crunchy guitars, the impossibly catchy hooks—but the lyrics have shifted inward, toward domestic life. Both Petsche and O'Neill are now married (to each other), and the rest of the band is too: bassist Nicola and guitarist Dillon Cavanagh-Whitfield got married after Circle Around the Free, as did the Petsches. Drummer Joel Nye rounds out the lineup. The band's new bio opens with "Two weddings and a baby," then describes them as "like Fleetwood Mac, but replacing the drama and drugs with more guitar solos."

The second single, Baby Blues, makes that domestic turn explicit. The music video follows Arthur, the Petsches' two-year-old son, as he explores the city—walking through leaves, wiping out on ice, examining a dial telephone in an antique store, wandering around with a red plastic garbage pail over his head. The camera trails behind him as his parents trail behind that. "He is curious, he has initiative, he has agency, and he has no problem telling us to just go away," Petsche said of the shoot. "Pretty early on we realized that it's such a funny experience because you see through your kid's eyes where everything is amazing, everything is a new experience. But your own eyes are just laser-locked on the back of their head. So they're discovering everything, and you're like, 'Alright, my entire life is walking three steps behind my son for the next six months.'"

Growth Spurts marks a turning point partly because Self-Cut Bangs is now the main musical outlet for both founders. Before the band, Petsche played with Calgary veteran rockers Napalmpom (he was also a festival manager at Sled Island), while O'Neill, an elementary school teacher, led the psychedelic synth-pop act Dark Time. Both bands are on hiatus now.

The album tracks are: Stonewalled, Witness, Ouroboros, Baby Blues, One Day, Roses, Writing on Stone, Be My Shelter, Silver Lines, A Lot of Nerve, and Hot For Me. It lands as Self-Cut Bangs consolidates around their core sound and their life together.