There’s a cold pulse to the new double single MUR/PONR from Calgary’s Preoccupations, the kind that feels like standing in a train station after midnight; fluorescent hum, concrete breathing, the sound of motion disguised as stillness. Preoccupations deal in the architecture of unease, but here, the geometry bends inward. Every note feels measured against the weight of existence itself.
Matt Flegel puts it plainly: “The well of dark things to write about seemingly has not dried up, and lyrically, it’s where I still tend to draw from… Draining all my anxieties into a song is often the only way I can get through a day.” The song carries that confession like a pulse beneath the skin. There are plains of burnt earth, oceans of space, and the low, disbelieving laughter of a man staring down the absurd theater of collapse. Each track is both confession and compulsion; an exhale caught between dread and devotion.
The production shimmers with rusted elegance: guitars grind and spiral like machinery trapped in memory, synths waver like light seen through smog. Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen display impressive control within chaos; Mike Wallace’s drums cut through the haze.
Flegel’s lyrics read like dispatches from a scorched diary: “Some songs exist in a world with barren plains of burnt earth, covered in a dust of shame, dread, death, where all the things I love are things that kill me.” The words hang heavy, but there’s beauty in the bleak arithmetic. Hope appears not as salvation but as static interference—something glimpsed, then gone.
On MUR, the emotional tide turns violent. “I was trying to translate the feeling of overwhelming, aggressive, helplessness and unwillingness to talk about things that scare you, into the form of sound,” Flegel says. The song lurches toward rupture, then releases like a scream inside a sealed room. It is catharsis stripped of romance.
The accompanying video splices images of police brutality—people in shackles, crowds burning with disbelief. It asks the only question worth asking when the walls start to close in: who does law and order benefit?
In its quietest moments, MUR feels like a monument to endurance. The band’s chemistry moves like a current. Preoccupations turn despair into design, finding structure in the chaos, and, somehow, grace within the grind.
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Listen to MUR/PONR below. You can stream and order the digital single here. Order the vinyl version via Born Losers Records here.
In May, the band will bring their revered live shows across the country in support of the album, hitting cities across North America including Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. The tour will be Preoccupation’s first tour since 2023. A full list of dates can be found below, and fans can purchase tickets here.
Live Dates:
- 10/07/25 – Rome, IT at MONK
- 10/08/25 – Turin, IT at sPAZIO211
- 10/09/25 – Bologna, IT at Locomotiv Club
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