– Crack Cloud – in session for Marc Riley – BBC 6 Music – August 17, 2022 – BBC 6 Music –
Vancouver musical Collective Crack Cloud, in session for Marc Riley at BBC 6 Music – recorded live on August 17, 2022.
Crack Cloud are a Canadian musical and multimedia collective based in Vancouver, British Columbia, formed by drummer and frontman Zach Choy. Alongside the group’s core musical members who perform live as a band, a large number of multimedia artists are also associated and operate simultaneously as an in-house production studio within the group, due to the project’s strong focus on visual storytelling.
To date, they have released two studio albums, Pain Olympics (2020) and Tough Baby (2022).
Formed in 2015, Crack Cloud started as the solo project of lead vocalist and drummer Zach Choy while he was living in Calgary, Alberta. Soon after, the project moved to Vancouver in 2018, where most of its members met through various addiction recovery and mental health programmes both as participants and as support workers. Choy stated that the purpose of Crack Cloud is a “healing mechanism” The group’s logo is also notable as an appropriation of the exclamation mark used by Concerned Children’s Advertisers, a series of public service announcements aimed towards children on various topics (drug abuse, peer pressure, exercise, etc.) that were broadcast on Canadian television during 1990’s until the mid-2000’s.
Crack Cloud released their debut studio album, Pain Olympics, via Meat Machine Records on July 17, 2020, preceded by four singles, The Next Fix, Ouster Stew, Tunnel Vision and Favour Your Fortune, released between May 2019 until October 2020. The record was received favourably, based on the album receiving an average score of 87 from 8 reviews on Metacritic, indicating “universal acclaim”.
On July 8, 2021, the group were named as the winners of the Hi-Fidelity Award, a prize for Canadian recording artists use of innovation within their music videos at the 2021 Prism Prize.
On May 11, 2022, Crack Cloud announced their second album, Tough Baby, released September 16, 2022 via Meat Machine, with the release of the album’s first single, Please Yourself. The album’s self-titled second single was released on July 8, 2022. Costly Engineered Illusion, the album’s third single was released September 1. 2022.
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