Creativity and Collective Consciousness: How Crack Cloud Has Healed Through Art
2022 has been a big year for the musical and multimedia collective Crack Cloud. With the release of their second album, Tough Baby, this past September and the experience of having been on tour for the past four months, the band’s musical reach has greatly expanded from their fringe community in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada. Despite these changes, they have stayed true to their mission of using creativity to support each other in sobriety and to process their trauma through music.
I sat down with Crack Cloud’s frontman and creator Zach Choy for a Zoom interview from Belgium, when the band had a day off from their busy touring schedule. Yet, Choy is hesitant to use any labels that designate him as the “leader” of Crack Cloud. What started out as a solo musical project in his bedroom quickly became a collaborative creative endeavor that spans across musical and visual mediums. The members of Crack Cloud are in constant fluctuation, with some members focusing on touring, others on their in-house mixed media studio, and still others on overdose prevention work in their home community.
Many members of the early iteration of Crack Cloud met while working in harm reduction shelters in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in 2018. The group connected over their shared high school experience of growing up in the hardcore punk scene in the ’90s, feeling alienated from the jock culture surrounding them. “There wasn’t really a space for weirdos or for people [with] baggage. So really, it came from an urgency of feeling like, ‘Hey, you know, there are quite a few displaced people in town, and I think that we all have our own talents and idiosyncrasies. If we gather and we kind of lean into these intersections, something special might come out of it,’” Choy says.
Crack Cloud became not only a band, but a way of life. Living together in a home they dubbed “Red House,” the members shared a collective mission of creating art while getting and staying sober. Choy explains, “I don't come from a place of criticism, but for me and for the people involved, we knew that we weren't cut out for that stuff.” The Red House was designated as a sober house, allowing the group to use creativity to “clarify and contextualize a lot of the trauma that [they] were dealing with on personal levels.” This established a key focus for Crack Cloud — the artistic group would serve as an “alternative to the 12-step program.”
Crack Cloud’s first album, Pain Olympics (2020), was intended as a cathartic capstone of a difficult period of the members’ lives. “We really were hoping that when [Pain Olympics] was done, we would feel like we could move on and just live our lives.” Despite the album’s acclaim, Choy says, “When it came out, that catharsis didn't happen [in] the way that we expected it to and that urgency was still there.”
So the band continued to use their art to heal and created Tough Baby. “I feel like we were able to get a lot of the darker stuff out with Pain Olympics,” Choy says. “One prerogative for us [with Tough Baby] was to focus more on things that excited and influenced us in our youth, before things got kind of rocky in our lives. Of course, we weren't able to stick to that strictly — there's definitely some cynicism on the record — but I think that it's definitely more optimistic, and by design, our hope was to make something that felt less fatalistic.”
Tough Baby mixes harsh, abrasive, industrial sounds with dreamlike, fantastical strings and sweeping melodies to portray the experience of facing hardships and pushing through them. The album strikes the perfect balance between acknowledging and working through your trauma, while simultaneously not letting your past define you in order to move forward.
The transformative, healing power of music — especially in one’s teenage years — is on display in the music videos for “Please Yourself” and “Tough Baby,” with both portraying narratives of a girl being pulled into an alternate universe while immersing herself in music. Choy says that Crack Cloud’s videos are equally as important as their music, and they often focus on “[taking] real things, real situations and then finding some sort of fantastical metaphor or allegory or just a way of representing something real, but in a way that is disguised.”
Image courtesy of April Arabella at So Young Magazine.
Though the short-term goals for Crack Cloud have evolved over the years, one constant has been a focus on supporting each other, a message that Choy hopes to pass along to listeners. “If I were to condense it into one sentence, I think it would just be [to simply not give up on each other.] There are so many people that could have given up on me.” He says that despite the bandmates’ individual differences, “We're all mortal and we're all living through the same things. And, you know, I think that there's something to be said about collective consciousness and that we all come from the same generation and we all share the same things. So I'm just all about community building and not community dividing.” This community building expands beyond the local community surrounding Crack Cloud — Choy says that having cathartic conversations with fans and interviewers feels like “the reward for navigating the music industry.”
Following the release of Tough Baby — with a plan to spend the rest of this year on tour — Crack Cloud is looking ahead with a focus on recalibration and personal reflection in 2023. Crack Cloud collaborators Bryce Cloghesy (a.k.a. Military Genius) and Isabelle Anderson are anticipating the birth of their first child, and Choy explains that this is helping him realize that it’s okay to slow down and enjoy the moment. “Where we're at now is we're realizing [that our art] came from this place of urgency and of wanting to deal with some things, but we also just love doing it. It's just really fun. It's what we're good at and it's how we hang out. It's how we have fun with each other. It's how we laugh and how we play. So what we're realizing is, we're just going to keep doing it. If it takes five years, if it takes ten years to do the next thing, that's okay. There's no rush.”
To keep up with their future projects, follow Crack Cloud on Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, and Bandcamp, or visit their website.