Still riding high after their excellent 2019 album Morbid Stuff, Toronto’s PUP are back with a new song and video “Anaphylaxis”. As usual with the quartet, the inspiration comes from a painful-yet-funny place, as Stefan Babcock explains:
“I got the idea for the song when I was at my partner’s cottage and her cousin got stung by a bee and his whole head started to swell up. His wife, although she was concerned, also thought it was pretty hilarious and started making fun of him even as they were headed to the hospital. He ended up being totally fine, but it was just funny to watch him freaking out and her just lighting him up at the same time. It reminded me of all the times I’ve started panicking for whatever reason and was convinced I was dying and the world was ending and no one would take me seriously. In retrospect, I always find those overreactions pretty funny. So we wrote a goofy song about being a hypochondriac and tried to make our guitars sound like bees at the beginning of it.”
Turning pain into joyous shout-alongs is PUP’s main calling card, and even though a bee sting is relatively low-stakes compared to some of the things we’ve known them to sing about, “Anaphylaxis” doesn’t lack any of the usual catharsis. In a time when we feel like punching our way out of our enclosures, it’s good to have some new PUP to channel that energy into singing along to.
Watch the claymation video for “Anaphylaxis” directed by Callum Scott-Dyson.
