Post-punk four-piece Ought have announced they have broken up. “We are no longer active as a band,” they wrote in a statement today. “When we started Ought in 2012 we had no greater aspirations than to play and write music together, and the fact that we were able to tour the world to such an extent and share so many rooms with so many of you has meant the world to us. We send lots of gratitude and love to all those we met and worked with along the way.”
Formed in Montreal in 2011, Ought signed to Constellation and released three full-length albums — 2014’s More Than Any Other Day, 2015’s Sun Coming Down and 2018’s Room Inside the World. Lead vocalist Tim Darcy released a solo album called Saturday Night in 2017.
Today’s announcement comes with the news that Ought’s Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy have formed new band called Cola, a project they started with U.S. Girls drummer Evan Cartwright. Check out Cola’s first single ‘Blank Curtain’ (out now via Fire Talk Records) below.
Talking about the new track, Cola said in a statement:
What started as stripped-down open D songwriting with a CR-78 soon became a full album and new band. We wanted to see how far we could stretch our compositions with just drums, one guitar, one bass, and one voice.
Blank Curtain is a quarter note kick drum pushing 240 bpm, a drone-like chord progression, and declarative vocals cutting through the haze. If you could invert the color of the Blank Curtain, you might have something like a Chicago house track that sounds like a band in a room.
