PACKS Are Determined to Tread Their Own Path

For those in the know, PACKS have quietly become one of the most intriguing bands to emerge from Canada in recent years. Headed up by Madeline Link, they have released two albums—2021’s Take The Cake and 2023’s Crispy Crunchy Nothing—and introduced us to a songwriter who not only picks up on and accentuates the minutiae of everyday life, but pairs it with a raw and propulsive garage/indie rock sound to match. On a winter night in London, where the city feels as though it’s on the precipice of frosting over, I meet up with Link at Islington’s The Garage, where PACKS are coming to the end of the UK leg of their European tour with Chicago-based rockers Slow Pulp. Yet, despite the layers and heads buried slightly into jackets, the conversation topic is tilted to the sunlit hues of Mexico, the recording backdrop of the band’s third LP Melt The Honey.

Link previously spent time in Mexico, having attended an artist’s residency in the country back in 2021. “I was looking at residencies all over the world, there was one I was going to apply to in Germany but I checked out Mexico and the environment, but also the general culture of Mexico City is what I wanted to be around.” she says. Gathering in Mexico City earlier in 2023, Link and her bandmates would spend 11 days at Casa Pulpo, a studio space removed from the bustle of everyday life—a place built with no straight lines within the walls or structure. It was, naturally, a space for inspiration and some of PACKS’ most improvisational work to date.

“We improvised with what Dexter [Nash] brought—he brought a four track, we didn’t have access to any amps, I didn’t have a guitar there. We were just using the least amount of items that we could possibly use,” Link explains. That bare bones approach led to the band becoming more intuitive when it came to the recording, with the song “Her Garden” featuring some less than conventional recording methods. “We were listening to lots of Cumbia and we found this rusty nail in a maintenance shed and we found a screw and we would play the screw and the nail to achieve that Cumbia sound,” Link continues.

Recording at Casa Pulpo can be seen as a metaphor for PACKS’ sound on Melt the Honey, its lack of conventional shape and structure mirroring the angular riffs and non-linear paths their instrumentals take. It naturally led to a shift in perspective, which had them heading down roads they had never even considered in previous recordings. “When it comes down to it, we love experimenting with what we play and we love fooling around with sounds. I think that the house maybe forced it upon us too,” Link says. The influence of their sessions in Mexico can be felt most clearly on the album opener “89 Days,” where the swoony, lackadaisical and lightly psychedelic backing feels like a natural bi-product of its surroundings. “I wrote that song in 2019 and it was faster when we recorded it at the time and we just started playing it very, very slowly when we recorded in Mexico and feeling very relaxed,” Link describes, with a smile as if her mind had gone back to that very moment, instead of being backstage huddling for warmth at The Garage.

PACKS started out when Link was in high school and was originally in a band called Triples with her sister, which gave her the confidence to start playing her own songs live in 2018. It wasn’t long before Nash (guitar), Noah O’Neil (bass) and Shane Hooper (drums) offered their services and PACKS morphed into the band we’re now familiar with. Their sense of perspective has been key in shaping the sound of PACKS as Link could now bounce ideas off of them. “They have added incredible dynamics, I usually write minute and a half songs, they’ve forced me to write longer stuff,” she explains. “They have a more pop-based appreciation, I like Micachu & The Shapes, bands that don’t have any structure.”

“AmyW,” an instrumental song from Melt The Honey that takes your hand and absorbs you in a journey through rain-soaked streets, exemplifies how Link’s relationship with her bandmates has helped her ideas become fully formed. Having initially written the song when she was 15, it was stuck in limbo—having been filled with “random noises” before Noah added in a bass solo that was able to bring forth a much-needed structure. There’s a great deal of trust on display between the members of the band; their time in Mexico was spent cooking for each other daily and being inspired by the community-driven music of the local town, making an effort to experience what was now right on their doorstep.

Melt The Honey is an album that has very much been influenced by a sense of place but away from recording music, Link has no permanent home to call her own. Having spent time moving between cities such as Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal in recent years, she has come to realize the importance of place and belonging and how they impact her productivity as a songwriter, for better and worse.

“I feel like the next song I write is going to be vastly different because I don’t have a home,” she says. “It definitely makes it less easy to write, I wrote one of the songs from the last album in Chile near the end of my time there and I wrote one of the songs from this album in Mexico whilst we were recording close to the end. It seems like if I’m in a new place I don’t feel comfortable enough to write a song until I understand my surroundings, I’ve gotten used to what’s around me and I can feel like I’m by myself.”

Only 10 months have passed between the release of Crispy Crunchy Nothing and Melt The Honey. The former was an album still concerned with life towards the end of lockdown, capturing not only feelings of isolation but also Link’s experiences of relationships that never quite worked out. The final track on Crispy Crunchy Nothing, “Always Be a Kid,” sees Link figuring out what love means to her, having accepted that these things take time to manifest. “It’s about loving yourself and appreciating that love doesn’t have to be the main goal,” she says. “If it does happen and you feel actually comfortable it’s a feeling you don’t want to hold onto too tightly either, otherwise you’re strangling it to death.”

On Melt The Honey, Link is writing from a place of contentment having found herself in a stable relationship, a big change in her life which is matched by the sunnier disposition found throughout the album. The track “Honey” is a point of realization, where a trip to Chile with her partner reaffirmed what she wanted from a relationship. Yet, there’s still a process where Link is learning what real love means to her: “Every single day is a new thing that I learned about what it means,” she continues. “At the beginning it feels more selfish and then it becomes less selfish and less about what you personally want.” Within a relatively short span of time between the two albums, we visit Link in a whole new chapter but since the release of 2021’s Take The Cake, we’ve been taken on a journey through the constant comings and goings in Link’s life. Melt The Honey has the most excitability of any PACKS album to date and it feels like only the beginning of an exciting new chapter.

PACKS songs often pick up on the moments we might not appreciate if we didn’t stop to take a look, whether that be the friendliness of your neighbors, staring at the clouds passing by or “shattered dreams and cotton candy” whilst celebrating the fourth of July. Highlighting these snapshots of everyday life helps to paint a vivid and familiar image in your mind in very few words. Take the lyrics of “Late to the Festivities” from Crispy Crunchy Nothing—“Cause like an apiary in a cemetery I was fooled by the flowers and now the spiral staircase will take me there”—which show Links’ ability to pick up on small elements of scenery and inflate them into a much wider narrative. The opening line of “Her Garden”—“From a Dutch Angle, I remember feeling this way”—feels like a perfect summary of this slanted perspective upon which all of the details are key. “I think it’s the only real way of getting through the day [drawing from the mundane], details just make things better even if it’s a shitty movie a lot of the time,” Link continues. “People like shitty movies because they can pick up on the details, everything can look great if you pay attention to the smaller things.”

PACKS songs have ventured into slacker rock territory before, not only through the daydreaming, carefree pace of their guitars and melodies but also through Link’s vocal delivery. The way she draws out notes makes the words feel as though they are about to collapse on top of each other like a trail of dominoes. On “Pearly Whites,” she lingers on the “s” of the title, making it sound like a hiss of steam from a kettle; “Take Care” has Link slowing down and speeding up words on a whim—and these small touches help breathe life into these stories. “The more I sing, the more comfortable I become experimenting with words,” she says. “As soon as I felt I was able to sing, it just feels like if the word is flat then the voice will come and inflate it to the shape that it’s meant to be.”

The way PACKS operate is non-conformist. During our conversation, Link makes known her disdain for the conventions in which the music industry operates, whether it be specific album release cycles or mixing a record for too long. On the flipside, PACKS like sharp, short takes where imperfections are more likely to be kept in their recordings and dissonance isn’t seen as a necessarily bad trait. You can hear all this throughout Melt The Honey, where they achieve a much grittier and more textural sound as a result.

“I try to be as non-perfectionist as I possibly can. You can see it everywhere all the time, like a band that never stops touring,” Link says. “Andre 3000 is the opposite of that, it’s like seeing people like what they’re doing and then trying to hold on to it so tightly that they’re just going to keep trying the same thing over and over again. There are so many bands that don’t release anything ever and they’re like ‘Oh, yeah, we’re still working on the mix. Oh, we needed to re-record everything.’ No you didn’t.”

It’s clear that PACKS will continue to keep making music at their own pace, after all Melt The Honey arrives just ten months after Crispy Crunchy Nothing and it perfectly encapsulates a band who are looking at life through their own unique lens. There’s no doubt that Link will continue to jot down her own take of life happening right before her eyes, no matter where in the world she may find herself.