Born Ruffians: ‘Canada, Nabokov and the Arc of Life’
Luke Lalonde discusses the grace and strangeness of Beauty’s Pride
Most art is about the passage of time. The rest is about the passages of time: The trails, rails, tunnels and skyways through, under and above the pastures of experience and the cities of memory, from the baby blanket to the burial shroud.
Time — and our strange and ordinary, dramatic, and mundane transit through this life — is also the subject of Beauty’s Pride, the new, extraordinary, moving, vibrating, surprising, interstellar, emotional, light and heavy new studio album from Born Ruffians.
Beauty’s Pride begins with Luke Lalonde singing, ““Everything, a brief crack of light between darkness/First and last/The future is starting/First smile, first penny, first kiss/Last words, last minute, last wish/Speak, memory.” That phrase — “Speak, memory” — is a reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s powerful memoir of the same name. Like Nabokov’s book, Beauty’s Pride deals extensively with the ordinary and extraordinary stone fields and soft lands of experience and memory, the goal posts of birth and mortality, and every mystery in between.
“I wanted to write a song that really zooms out and is kind of a macro song about life, human experience, my life specifically, but a little bit of fiction in there,” says Luke Lalonde, who has been playing guitar, singing, and writing songs for Born Ruffians for over 20 years. “Initially it was almost an experiment. I wanted it to almost be the timeline between birth and death, like the two eternities of darkness and everything that’s in between those — first steps to chronic disease diagnosis and back to, elementary school, like almost ping pong from beginning to end to the middle. And I was really proud of the way it came out. And definitely, reading that book helped to pull that song out; it was just one of those sorts of serendipitous coincidences where what I was reading happened to not only inform what I was writing, but also kind of line up with it in a way.”
Sonically and conceptually, Beauty’s Pride is a trip on the gorgeous transcontinental line between quirky and enchanting. Absolutely bursting with exquisite grace, Beauty’s Pride is a sparkling, seductive, soothing yet spark-shooting adventure, a modern pop enchantment. It is your favorite new record. It thumps, sings, pulses and sighs, it’s full of candy and starlight, and I can’t praise it enough. True, it moves a little away from the shattered pub glasses of the past Ruffian adventures, yet it retains recognizable aspects of their swimming-with-electric eels legacy and adds buttermilk and dreams; lots of big guitars and tiny guitars; and texture, texture, texture, and texture.
Consistently, Beauty’s Pride has the ambience of a Floyd/Radiohead type adventure, except it’s tight as fuck and holds fast to the power pop rails: at times, it sounds like the Oasis album I wish Scott Weiland had made (during his too-short lived Badfinger/Neil Innes stage), or it sounds like the Undertones doing an Alan Parsons Project thing (really, it does). (Note to Mr. Lalonde: Listen to Scott Weiland’s 12 Bar Blues, you’ll see what I mean.) (Note to reader: The author confesses he helped make 12 Bar Blues. But that’s another story.)
When I listen to Beauty’s Pride, I keep on thinking, “Grace and strangeness,” which is a quality you’ve always had; likewise, I’ve always thought that you make big, quiet music, by which I mean music that’s loud and weird and exquisite at any volume…at any volume, the tension and the beauty of what you do really comes across.
Luke Lalonde: That’s wonderful, thank you. I wish I could say that was something we always strive to do, but it’s, I guess maybe something we do without meaning to.
This album doesn’t sound like your earlier stuff, but it doesn’t not sound like your past work, either. It’s an evolution, not a revolution. And it occurs to me, you just turned 39; and when someone is 39, no one expects them to be the same as they were when they were 22. I mean, when you were 22, you took showers less, your room was messy. You didn’t pay your credit card bills on time, if you even had a credit card, whatever. You didn’t like salads, you ate peanut butter at every meal. My point being no one expects you to act like that when you’re 40 years old. Yet when a band sounds different at age 39 than they did at age 22, people go like, “Oh, they changed! Why did they go and do that? Why can’t they be the same as when they were 22 or 25?” It’s as if people don’t apply the same rules of natural evolution to music that that they apply to like human life.
Well, it’s rare that somebody would come up and say that directly, but people say it. It’s always sort of couched in a backhanded compliment. And I’ve learned to just take the compliment when someone says, “Oh, I really liked your first record.” And I understand that it is a compliment, because I have bands where I have that relationship with them where, for whatever reason, I just wasn’t willing to continue on their journey. And it’s nothing personal at all. You just like “that” thing. And we have fans that have come in at every stage of our discography who like “that” version of Born Ruffians — “My favorite record is your third record, why doesn’t anything else sound like that?” People don’t realize how insulting it can be, but it’s also an extremely normal stance to take as a fan. As I’ve gotten older, and as you confront those past versions of yourself and you want to evolve and move on, you have this audience member in your head telling you “No, do what you did before.” Then I have phantom arguments with that person all the time, because as an artist making art, I just want to do what’s exciting to me.
Although this record is clearly a progression, and it’s multi-layered in concept and every aspect of execution, I wouldn’t call it slick.
“Slick” is a word gets thrown around a lot, too, sometimes in a positive way, but probably more often in a pejorative way. I think in some ways it’s like a photograph. Like you’re just going to look the way you look in a photo. You know, you might like get the haircut and the clothes in order to try and look a certain way, but then you see your photo and you’re like, “That’s still me. I just look the way I look.” And there’s something about a sound, too, that even if you attempt to be slick, you’re going to end up fucking it up. I think those are my favorite records too; something like Roxy Music, which has a lot of pop value and could be called like a slick production — like Avalon or something — but there’s just something undeniable in its DNA that it’s just weird and cool.
As I began to repeatedly listen to Beauty’s Pride, one the things that really made me fall for it are what I’m going to refer to as the interstitial tracks, these handful of very short tracks and linking bits, which are so small yet so gigantic, they have a power to them that define the record. At what point did you decide this sort of thing was going to be a part of this record?
I found a notebook recently that I forgot I had. And I found this page that was notes for Beauty’s Pride, and I completely forgot making these. One of the notes was that the album should be maybe 40% or 50% or even 60% instrumental. I wanted it to feel somewhere between an album and almost like found audio — not necessarily skits or a narrative, but maybe a vibe like you’re in a room at a concert and then you leave the concert. And I wanted it to tell a bit of a story through sound, and to take cues from some records, maybe more like Notorious BIG or something where it does start with an audio collage and a life story thing. I wanted a lot of that. And then as time went on, you just end up writing songs. So I think some of that idea stuck around and it got a little diminished, but I’m really happy with where it ended up. And those bits you are referring to were definitely always a big part of it. I always like writing quite a lot of instrumental music, and the ones that ended up on the record are very purposeful: they either introduce a song or provide a nice barrier between two other songs and a break so that if you are listening to the record as a whole, you get those ups and downs, quiet moments that reset your ears, reset the vibe before this or that comes back in.
A wonderful function of these interstitials is that they immediately put the listener in the mindset of, “Oh, it’s an actual album. I’m going to treat this as an album.”
That’s the hope. Of course, I don’t begrudge anybody listening to a song and just doing that one song. I never get mad at that because as a fan of music too, I do that. But you hope that you can pull the listener in with the sense that they just finished the record and then they go, “Oh, that was great.” Like, they just kept going.
I don’t necessarily want to go to this place, but I feel sort of compelled to: As a Canadian band that has worked in the United States relatively frequently and plans to continue to do so, how has what’s happened here in the last year changed your perspective, as you think about the next American touring cycle? You can choose not to answer this.
No, I’m happy to answer it. I think it’s something people would be curious about who aren’t Canadian. It’s obviously on our minds, as part of our job is traveling to the States, reaching an audience down there. There’s so many more people down there, of course, every Canadian band wants to be able to tour down there and have fans down there. And right now, there’s a low-key anxiety that I’m sure will ramp up as we get closer to the tour. I guess the, the most literal worry is, are we going to get more hassle at the border? We’ve always had relatively good and normal experiences at the border. We do everything above board, we have all the right paperwork, all the right visas, all this stuff. But the bigger existential threat that is being posed is this sort of ideological shift, this kind of propaganda that, you know, Canadians are bad, Canadians are screwing Americans over, and all this stuff. And I’ve heard stories firsthand and secondhand about Canadians with Ontario license plates being told at gas stations down south, “Move on, we don’t serve Canadians here.” That kind of thing is a little scary. But then you also hear so many stories about Canadians who work in the States saying nothing’s actually different, it’s more hot air than anything else. But all those things are concerning — like, being essentially told by the leader of the biggest, most powerful country in the world, “We don’t think your country should exist,” it can’t help but make you feel a little bit uneasy in ways that you don’t even sort of register. And it’s certainly strange to enter a gas station that is completely decked out wall-to-wall in MAGA gear. But then you talk to people and you realize, well, you’re still all just people; like, everybody’s just still a guy or a girl or whatever. Everybody’s just still normal people. And then politics comes up and you’re like, whoa, we’re really different in that way. But then you keep talking and you’re like, but we’re still kind of the same.
It occurs to me that this is something that might come out of this whole thing: For many Canadian bands in the past, America has been a golden ring, a goal. Whereas now it might be, we’ve got a good thing here, we are going to be goddamn happy here, we don’t need the approval of the music industry in the United States. Does that make any sense to you?
Maybe it’s just getting older and wiser. Certainly, as a young person I would’ve cringed at anything too Canadian. I would’ve cringed at a lot of Tragically Hip lyrics. And I think as I get older and listen more deeply to Gord Downey’s words, and hearing the Canadian-ness of them, I feel a real connection there and a pride and a desire to embrace that more. Also, I’m not a fan, but all of this coincided with Drake becoming one of the biggest stars in the world, and with him kind of repping Canada in a way that nobody else had so proudly and being very openly Canadian. A lot of Canadian singers and musicians and actors and famous Canadians aren’t ashamed of being Canadian, but they certainly don’t lead with it. And Drake led with it by constantly bringing Toronto into part of his identity. And I know Drake’s not necessarily exactly cool right now to a lot of people because of the Kendrick beef, but that was also maybe part of it. Perhaps this current era not only brings out a certain kind of Canadian pride and made a lot of people feel more patriotic, but maybe it also trickles down or affects art too, perhaps making Canadian musicians more proud of being Canadian.
In terms of identity, I think a parallel thing that relates to your band, is, well, labels. When you were a young person and beginning to listen to and fall in love with music, and even as Born Ruffians began to emerge as a working band, there was an idea that there was this thing called “indie rock.” And I think the streaming era has made that largely a meaningless label. It’s 2025. Who gives a shit if something’s on a major label? It’s all streaming on my computer anyway. Likewise, I think “post-punk” is a meaningless phrase. Because everything is post something or other, post Beatles or post Bo Diddley, whatever. And those two phrases — indie rock and post punk — seem to get applied to your band all the time…do you think that those sorts of labels are as meaningless as I suspect they are, especially as you begin to evolve with your music?
I do agree that it’s a parallel thing. It’s not all the de-emphasis of America as a thing, as something to strive for in the Trump era. It’s also related to the leveling that has happened with Spotify, streaming, the Internet; all of these things have combined and have created a younger generation that seems less hung up on any kind of labels. And it’s impossible to forecast trends because they don’t really exist anymore. You don’t get punched in the face anymore ’cause your hair’s wrong and you’re not like the “right kind” of punk, right? That’s just not a thing anymore. You get punched in the face for other dumb stuff, true, but there’s not these boundaries around genre. Kids can like a wide variety of stuff and still be cool. Like you said, it’s a parallel thing with the leveling of the internet. Pros and cons aside, it’s the way it is. And it can be a good thing. In general, I was also always confused when someone would say post-punk this, post-punk that — I was always just like, I don’t know what that means. I don’t really care. Can I just hear it and then I’ll see if I like it or not. And whenever anybody would apply those words to us, I’d be like, “That’s just marketing words that labels made up to sell people stuff. It’s never really meant anything.”
I read something that referred to you as Twitch Rock. And I thought to myself, well, I suppose that’s vaguely descriptive in the same way it’s descriptive of, you know, the music of the Birthday Party or Pere Ubu or Au Pairs, whatever, but it tells me nothing about a band that is growing and evolving, and what those seeds of growth are. And what’s interesting is that any time a band does something, some of their fans are gonna go, “Oh, that’s different. That’s not like what they were doing in the past.” But the fact is, like with writers or filmmakers, the seed of that change was always there. There’s something in your new album that reflects something that was in your heart in the third rehearsal you ever had, if that makes any sense.
I agree with that completely. If you travel in a straight line long enough, eventually you come back to where you started. And you realize that you’re always on this path, that you kind of return to who you are. And you’re always there. We’ve never intentionally tried to maintain some version of our past selves that we think is marketable or we think people want us to do. I always joke that we’re kind of lucky that we never had a hit. Our first record did well, but it wasn’t this kind of explosive success where we had to live up to that — it’s always still this feeling of just striving to make something good. And that was always a nice silver lining to not having some kind of massive success: it has allowed us to not be beholden to some past version of ourselves. You still kind of carry on as yourselves. And when I listen to a new record from a band that’s been around for 20 years, I don’t want them to sound like they did 20 years ago, but I’m kind of banking on the fact that some nugget of them is going to be there. And I really think that’s what’s going on with Beauty’s Pride, it still contains the essence of what makes Born Ruffians appealing to people, whatever that is. And I don’t know what it is. I almost don’t want to know ’cause I don’t want to tamper with it, but that essence is there.
- The Roots of Sunn O))) - April 15, 2026
- The Very Possibly True Origin Story of Geese - March 20, 2026
- Revisiting My Words on Springsteen - February 9, 2026
You May Also Like
-
February 7, 2023 -
May 2, 2025 -
October 2, 2023