PACKS Are Determined to Tread Their Own Path
Madeline Link talks their time spent recording in Mexico, how a sense of home can affect songwriting and looking at the finer details in life.
Photo by Eva Link
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.