Kal Marks with Paper Lady and amiright?

Kal Marks have never made a record as personal as Wasteland Baby. Though Carl Shane, the band’s vocalist-guitarist, has made a career off of exploring blunt, uncomfortable truths through song, with Wasteland Baby, he steered Kal Marks toward something utterly new. Shane looked inward to stare down a fear that had long plagued him: What would it look like to have a child in a world that looks like this? “The album was driven by the fears I’m having about being a father,” says Shane. “The initial spark was this fear, and I thought that maybe if I could express it, I could overcome it.”

What started out with this simple premise slowly grew into a sprawling, borderline-concept record. It’s no surprise, then, that Kal Marks went deeper and darker than ever before when writing Wasteland Baby. Though, in order to reach that final product, it required the band—bassist-vocalist John Russell, drummer Adam Berkowitz, and guitarist-vocalist Christina Puerto, who is also Shane’s partner—to interrogate every decision they made with exacting detail. “We really had to be more thoughtful if we really wanted to make a more mature, cohesive record,” says Shane. ”We were really all on the same page in that we wanted to make something really, really special and that was going to require us putting a lot of ego aside and just trying to serve the songs as best as possible.”

There’s an acerbic feeling running throughout Wasteland Baby but also a willingness to keep pushing forward to find the few patches of sunshine among the looming darkness. It’s a feeling that the members of Kal Marks felt when they listened back to the final version of Wasteland Baby. “When we finished, I remember Christina saying that this is the best piece of work that any of us have ever done,” says Shane. In many ways, Wasteland Baby feels both like an endpoint for the first phase of Kal Marks, and the beginning of a new chapter for its members. The result is that, perhaps, things will look different for Kal Marks in the future. “In an ideal world, Kal Marks will go on forever. But it may be the end of a chapter for a while. I don’t want it to be the end, but there was an element running through the album that maybe could be the end,” says Shane. No matter what the future holds, Wasteland Baby is an emphatic reminder to brush off the things that keep you from truly living and venture into the unknown. You never know what will happen when you do.

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