Sham Family

Sham Family (band).

1. Your new favourite thing from Toronto.
2. Sword of punk-rock righteousness.
3. Loud in all the right directions.
4. Pure-heartedly ambitious in several other “right” directions you haven’t thought of yet.

   (Benjamin Rayner, rambling enthusiastically)

Welcome to the Sham Family. Good on the quartet’s Toronto homeboys Born Ruffians for making it the first non-Ruffians release on their suddenly extra-intriguing Wavy Haze Records imprint. But, moreover, good on frontman Kory Ross for finally steppin’ up and doing something concrete with the “hundreds and hundreds of demos” – the handful of them that lived long enough to pass muster as Sham Family songs worthy of inclusion on this record, anyway – he’s been stockpiling in the shadows.

“This project has always kind of been my baby that I was always working on because I always needed to be working on some sort of music when I wasn’t working in other bands, and it’s gone through so many stages of its life,” says Ross. “It started as just a four-track cassette-recorder wall-of-noise shoegaze project. Then it was gonna be this industrial-noise side-project thing that I just could not wait to unleash upon the world.

The forced break that was 2020 proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it gave Sham Family time to take a second look at its material and conclude “Okay, we can do better.” And so they kept labouring away in their practice space to “hone in on this thing and just kind of perfect what we want to do,” eventually scrapping all but one of the tunes from that first studio session – the scorching, Fugazi-esque noise-rock teardown “Spitting Image” – in favour of an entirely new four-cut slab of agit-punk fury recorded by themselves that they were even more “super-hyped” to put out. Rather than drop Sham Family, the EP, on deaf ears during the pandemic, however, they’ve resisted the urge to release it until now, when there’s a little light (maybe) appearing at the end of the pandemic tunnel. And if you think these songs rip as more or less “live” recordings here, wait until you hear them tearing through you from an actual stage.

There’s an activist streak displayed on tunes like “This Blue Mob” – a seething anti-police screed written in the wake of the George Floyd murder – and the “pink”-capitalism putdown “Plaque Protection,” Sham Family wants the shows to come in support of its debut to build “community” and smash barriers above and beyond the traditional DIY-punk sense of the word. These guys have friends who move in the worlds of hip-hop and electronic music, even K-pop, and they see no reason why all those genres and all those crowds can’t mingle at the same shows. “We don’t wanna just play shows for punks. We live in Toronto, y’know? This city is so diverse and I don’t wanna just play for young white dudes. There’s so much more going on.”

This takes us back to the name Sham Family, which has no limits or restrictions on membership. All are welcome in this family. “It’s just always kind of felt like that. We’re not just a band,” says Ross. “At the end of the day, we’re all best friends. We’ve lived together forever – me and Jay have lived together since we were 18, on and off, and have been sleeping on each other’s couches since we were 12. So it’s a little bit of that, but it’s also about the community thing we’re talking about. If we have someone collaborating with us or onstage with us, then they’re just part of the Sham Family.”