Toronto has never been an easy city to live in, especially if you’re trying to make a living without selling your soul. Rawls Royce know the feeling. The Toronto punk four-piece has turned its frustrations with the city into Woe, Toronto, a new single that looks back nearly a century to find some uncomfortable parallels with the present.
A City With a History of Resistance
Formed in 2016 by four friends who met while studying political science in graduate school, Rawls Royce mix melodic hooks, anthemic choruses, and beer-soaked gang vocals with a healthy dose of politics. Fans of PUP, Jeff Rosenstock, The Menzingers, and Against Me! should feel right at home.
“Woe, Toronto” explores the city’s class conflicts, political violence, and anti-fascist organizing during the Great Depression. Its protagonist dreams of crossing the Atlantic to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, joining the nearly 1,700 Canadians who volunteered between 1936 and 1939. But there was a catch: the Canadian government passed the Foreign Enlistment Act in 1937, making it illegal to enlist.
For the band, this isn’t just a history lesson. Their Toronto is an expensive, commercially driven place that can be particularly unforgiving to working-class people and artists. The song finds a connection between the disillusionment of the 1930s and the frustrations many people face today, while looking back at a time when collective action offered an alternative to reactionary politics.
Carrying a New World
The accompanying video, filmed and edited by ToeKnee Radavoi, combines archival footage of Toronto from the 1920s and ’30s with clips of the band performing. It opens with a quote from Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, published in the Toronto Daily Star in 1936: “We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”
It’s a fitting introduction to a song about fighting for something better, even when the city around you seems determined to wear you down. Rawls Royce clearly have a complicated relationship with Toronto: they love it, flaws and all, but aren’t about to pretend those flaws don’t exist.
“Woe, Toronto” is the first taste of the band’s upcoming debut full-length, a 15-song concept album due in January 2027 via Steady Riot Records. If this single is any indication, Rawls Royce are ready to make some noise about the past, the present, and what we might still change.
