Press release –
Punk-rock four-piece Plz Respond release their new single ‘Budgets & Bootstraps’ – a loud, fast, and furious gut-punch of a track aimed squarely at the billionaire class and the politicians who carry their water. Written by frontman and drummer Galen Crampsey, produced by Logan Treaty, and mastered by Johnny Ross, the song arrives as one of the most direct and unambiguous political rock tracks to come out of the Ontario punk scene in recent memory. It is, in the best tradition of the genre, exactly what it sounds like: a band that has had enough.
‘Budgets & Bootstraps’ opens with a snarl and doesn’t let up. The target is the tired, condescending advice handed down to working people whenever they dare point out that rent is too high, groceries cost too much, and a 60-hour work week doesn’t pay the bills anymore: just learn to budget. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The chorus lands like a fist: “Budgets and bootstraps, budgets and bootstraps / I am so sick of your budgets and bootstraps.” By the bridge – “Billionaires are not your friends / billionaires are not your friends” – the song has become something closer to a chant, the kind of thing you scream along to at the back of a sweaty room and mean every word.
The band are characteristically direct about where the song comes from. “There are people with yachts that have yachts to house the people who work on the yachts,” they write. “Here in Canada, we are seeing corporations make record profits, collect subsidies and handouts from our governments, and then shut down and jump ship. Those of us who work 40, 50, 60 hours a week have our taxes taken to bail corporations out and our social securities get cut.” From housing being bought up by corporations to unions being shut down by government back-to-work legislation, the grievances in ‘Budgets & Bootstraps’ are specific, real, and shared by a lot of people who aren’t going to hear them named this plainly anywhere else on the radio. “You can’t budget your way out of fixed bread prices,” they say. And this song doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Plz Respond – Galen Crampsey (drums, piano/keys, lead vocals), Bryan Crouch (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), Brandon Smith (lead guitar, backing vocals), and David Bunn (bass, backing vocals) – emerged from Oshawa’s growing rock scene with loud guitars, politically driven lyrics, and a live show that earns its reputation the hard way. Drawing on the raw energy of The Orwells, the anthemic working-class urgency of Sam Fender, and the grit of ’90s grunge, they play like a band with something to prove and something to say. They have shared stages at The Biltmore and the Bovine Sex Club, opening for Ill Scarlett, Lear Haven, and Excuses Excuses, and have put their music where their politics are – raising funds for the Durham Rape Crisis Centre and the AIDS Committee of Durham through benefit shows.
‘Budgets & Bootstraps’ is Plz Respond’s most focused and urgent statement yet – the fourth in a run of singles building toward something bigger, with several more on the way. For a band that believes rock music exists to say things the working class can relate to, this is the song that makes the case loudest.
