'Two weddings and a baby': With third album, Calgary's Self-Cut Bangs ask big questions and offer big riffs

We independently select everything we recommend. Buying through us may earn us a commission, which supports our work.

In the music video for Self-Cut Bangs’ Baby Blues, the camera follows a busy two-year-old as he explores the city.

Among other adventures, we see him walking through leaves, wiping out on the ice, checking out an old dial telephone in an antique store and wandering around with a red plastic garbage pail over his head. The star is Arthur, the first child of Self-Cut Bangs’ founders and recently married Calgary music veterans Shawn Petsche and Cayley O’Neill (now Petsche). It’s a simple premise made up entirely of tracking shots that follow Arthur as he explores every nook and cranny of his world as his parents trail behind him.

“He is curious, he has initiative, he has agency, and he has no problem telling us to just go away,” says Shawn Petsche. “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.’ ”

Baby Blues is the second single on Self-Cut Bangs third album, Growth Spurts, and features the band’s hallmark mix of monster guitar riffs and impossibly catchy hooks. The band has certainly maintained what made them such a breath of fresh air five years ago, when they released a self-titled debut. It was a pandemic-era side project that sounded nothing like an album made during an anxiety-filled lockdown should sound like. Despite being recorded in the couple’s small apartment in 2020, it was loud, fast, brash and filled with hooks. There was no long-term plan. The first song was written as a means of self-preservation to battle boredom and isolation. It sounded good, so the couple spent the next few months writing and recording a new song every Saturday.

Their sophomore album, Circle Around the Free, followed a similar template. Neither album was shallow, but both had that sense of keeping the real world at bay.

With Growth Spurts, however, Self-Cut Bangs seem to have entered a new phase. Part of that may be because it is now the main musical outlet for both Petsche and O’Neill. Prior to Self-Cut Bangs, they made a point of not interfering with each other’s musical projects. A former festival manager at Sled Island, Petsche’s main musical gig was playing with Calgary’s veteran rockers Napalmpom. O’Neill, an elementary school teacher, led psychedelic synth-pop act Dark Time. While neither of those bands has officially called it quits, both are on hiatus.

The real change, however, likely has more to do with the domestic situation of the band. Self-Cut Bangs is now made up of two married couples. Both the Petsches and Nicola and Dillon Cavanagh-Whitfield, who play bass and guitar in the band, got married after the release of Circle Around the Free. In what may be the best band promo pic in the history of the Calgary music scene, photographer Heather Saitz had both couples and drummer Joel Nye emulate Annie Leibovitz’s famous 1977 Rolling Stone cover photo of Fleetwood Mac crowded onto one bed. At that time, the members of Mac were entangled in extracurricular romances, dissolving marriages and rampant drug use. 

Self-Cut Bangs’ new bio begins with the line, “Two weddings and a baby,” before describing the band as “like Fleetwood Mac, but replacing the drama and drugs with more guitar solos.”

Their previous two records took six months to record. Growth Spurts took two years. While the team of Petsche and lyricist-vocalist O’Neill remained efficient songsmiths once things got rolling, finding the time and “headspace” to write was more difficult.

When O’Neill did start penning lyrics, she found herself in a very different headspace than before.

“The songs on the previous albums were escapist,” says O’Neill. “This album ended up a little more existential because I was pregnant, and there were a lot of themes of life and death and the snake Ouroboros and deeper thinking throughout the entire record. Also, themes were inspired by the news. It just feels like we’ve been going through catastrophe after catastrophe. So I think some of that also (led to) big-life questions about society.”

The album’s opening single, the pummeling post-punk anthem Ouroboros, is named after the ancient symbol of a snake eating itself to represent the cycle of life. The album opens with the Stonewalled, a power-pop gem that recalls the New Pornographers. It’s followed by the hard-rock crunch of Witness, with Petsche and Cavanaugh-Whitfield offering unrelenting guitar riffs behind O’Neill’s catchy melody. Both of those songs offer political commentary about troubled times. On Witness, O’Neill says she was directly inspired by the thorny political culture in Alberta when writing the words “I witness denial, I witness division, I witness misinformation, I take on your pain.”

Meanwhile, despite the exceptionally cute video that accompanies it, Baby Blues tackles the real anxieties of new parents.

“Baby Blues was written post-partum, so focusing on what it’s like to pull yourself together after a birth and be a new human,” O’Neill says. “The role of a mom is something that requires you to step up in a lot of ways, speaking up for yourself and speaking up for your child. There’s a lot of opinions out there. You need to really find out who you are and what you think to guide and direct this small human.”

What hasn’t changed is the band’s penchant for creating memorable hook-laden choruses and melodic verses.

“Sometimes, Shawn would send me music, and I’m like, ‘the verse could be the chorus and the chorus could be the verse, what is the chorus?’ Because he thinks of everything as a hook. I try to match it with my vocals,” O’Neill says.

For Petsche, his interest in “earworms and hooks” and classic-rock guitar riffs is taken to a higher sphere because of his wife’s contributions.

“Cayley is the magic in the band, the magical ingredient,” he says. “You can have a rock song and think ‘this is a pretty good rock song,’ and the way she structures the lyrics and where things fall and where repetition falls, it just slightly changes what you would expect from that rock song. I credit Cayley entirely with that. I feel like there’s a version of this band with a different singer and we’d be a pretty good but generic rock band. I think there is something a little spicier with her in it.”

“But I’m biased,” he adds.

Growth Spurts is now available.