Bad Waitress: Toronto Art-Punk's Dark Return

Some bands come back after five years sounding smoothed out and grateful. Bad Waitress came back sounding like they have something to get off their chest.

The Toronto quartet's new album, In The Hollow, arrives October 30, 2026 via Stomp Records, and the two singles released so far suggest a band turning its famous confrontation inward. This is still punk with its teeth showing. It is just aimed somewhere more uncomfortable now: at old relationships, at changing identities, at the person you used to be.

Five years in the making

Bad Waitress are Kali-Ann Butala, Katelyn Molgard, Moon, and Nicole Cain. They built their name in Toronto's punk underground, emerging with 2018's Party Bangers: Volume 1 and pushing into heavier territory on 2021's No Taste. Along the way they shared stages with Fucked Up, L7, Rise Against, Wolf Parade, and The Bronx, and earned a reputation for shows with almost no distance between band and audience.

In The Hollow is their first full-length in five years, and their second album overall. The band produced the 10-track record themselves, recording with engineer Josh Korody at Wychwood Sound in Toronto. Press around the album describes it as taking their already volatile punk somewhere darker, stranger, and more inward, shaped by the isolation and upheaval of the years since No Taste, with members revisiting old memories and relationships from the vantage point of having changed themselves.

What they sound like

Bad Waitress play art punk, post-punk, garage punk, and noise rock, all at once and all with intent. Guitars scrape against a punishing rhythm section while Butala moves between melody, sneer, and something closer to a warning. If you like L7, Babes in Toyland, and the nervous art-punk electricity of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the heavier post-punk pull of METZ and Fugazi, this band will feel familiar and still entirely their own.

The singles show both sides of the new record. "Lovin' Kind," released August 31 with a music video, takes the shape of a love song and then makes every romantic instinct feel dangerous. "Tell you I love you / Then destroy you," Butala sings, before the chorus lands its warning: "I'm not the lovin' kind." The October follow-up, "I Only Like You When I'm Drunk," pushes further into the same uneasy territory, turning intoxication, attraction, and self-disgust into a bleary collision of jagged guitars and wiry tension. There is no enlightened narrator standing safely on the other side of a bad relationship here. The songs stay inside the mess.

Live

Bad Waitress play Vancouver's Cobalt Cabaret on November 10, 2026, shortly after the album lands. If their reputation holds, expect a room with no barrier between band and crowd.

Start here

"Lovin' Kind" (2026) — the comeback single, and the clearest statement of the new album's darker direction.
"I Only Like You When I'm Drunk" (2026) — messier, bleary, and even less willing to resolve itself.
No Taste (2021) — the previous album, for the heavier groundwork this record builds on.
In The Hollow (October 30, 2026) — the full 10-track record, from opener "I Only Like You When I'm Drunk" through closer "Low."

Where to follow

Bandcamp: https://badwaitress.bandcamp.com/
Label: https://stomprecords.com/
Pre-order In The Hollow through Stomp Records ahead of the October 30 release.