Upcoming Releases
Alternative rock band Cartel has announced their highly anticipated fifth studio album, Learning How To Cope, set to be released September 18 via Field Day Records. Featuring previous singles “Oxy Moron” and “Give Or Take”, Learning How To Cope marks the band’s first full-length release since 2013’s Collider.
Pugh shares: “This music saved me. It helped me reconnect with empathy, with community and with the idea that everybody belongs. That ethos – honesty, openness, and taking care of your people – is what this record is built on. It feels different, but it still feels like Cartel.”
Along with the album announcement comes new singles “Deadbeat Drag” and “Shirts & Skins”, a musical Molotov cocktail the group previously unveiled in the wake of Minneapolis ICE murders.
“We're way past the point of being able to sit back and just provide the safe space that people can go and get away from everything,” Pugh says, referencing “Shirts & Skins“. “Society has been doing that long enough and not having difficult conversations – and that's just kind of over. If you're not going to say something now, when are you ever going to fucking say something?”
Cartel didn’t come back just to look backward. After crisscrossing the globe for the 20th anniversary of their landmark album Chroma, the Conyers, GA-formed group – vocalist Will Pugh, guitarists Joseph Pepper and Nic Hudson, along with recent additions drummer Kyle Adams and bassist Kevin Mahoney – have used that momentum to light the fuse on their future on their first album in 13 years. Written against a backdrop of both personal reckoning and global unrest, the album pairs the hook-driven songwriting the group has always been known for with sharper edges, heavier weight, and a renewed sense of purpose.
The album’s 12 songs find Pugh taking aim at a wide range of targets – the ruling class, broken systems and personal betrayals, among them – in a way that’s equal parts confrontational and cathartic. Songs like first single “Oxy Moron” and “Deadbeat Drag” lean into the trio’s ’90s alt-rock influences, while the riff-heavy “Shirts & Skins” elevates a deep-rooted hardcore ethos and reject the idea that music should stay neutral when the world outside is anything but. It all combines to make Learning How To Cope the most important album of the band’s career on both a personal and artistic level. After playing to hundreds of thousands of fans at Warped Tour, Slam Dunk, and When We Were Young, it would have been easy for Cartel to choose comfort over disruption. Instead, they’ve done what they’ve always been best at: challenging themselves and their audience alike, armed with something important to say.
