From Ought to Cola: a Montreal band's ten-year climb to its best record

In November 2021, Ought announced they were breaking up. In the same press release, the same musicians announced they were carrying on as Cola. Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy kept going, brought in a drummer named Evan Cartwright who had played with U.S. Girls, and the first thing the new band did was release a single called "Blank Curtain." It was an odd way to quit. Bands that last a decade usually either limp on under the old name or just disappear. Ought did neither. They closed one identity and walked straight into another on the same afternoon.

I keep coming back to that move now that Cola's third album, Cost of Living Adjustment, is out. It landed in May to the best reviews anyone in this orbit has gotten, and it only makes sense as the end of a long climb that started in a Montreal apartment a decade ago.

The Ought years

Ought formed in Montreal in 2011, a few guys who met as roommates and started a band in a city that was, right then, loud. The casseroles protests of 2012 had people out banging pots in the street most nights. Their first real album, More Than Any Other Day (2014) on Constellation Records, caught that jittery civic mood and turned it into something close to euphoria. Darcy talk-sang like a man working a thought out in real time, the rhythm section locked into a nervy Feelies-style churn, and the record kept tipping between panic and joy in a way that felt genuinely fresh for a guitar band. Pitchfork gave it Best New Music. It deserved it.

Sun Coming Down (2015) followed fast and came out leaner and more wound-up, with "Beautiful Blue Sky" stretching the dread out over six minutes. By their 2018 album the band had grown slicker, adding synths and a cleaner finish that split the people who loved the early jaggedness. None of it was bad. It just felt like a group that had found its sound and was now decorating the same room. Then the pandemic stalled everyone, and Darcy and Stidworthy seem to have decided the Ought name had said what it had to say.

Cola, version one

What makes Cola interesting is that they did not try to be Ought again with a fresh logo. Going from four players to three forced the issue. Cartwright is a different kind of drummer than what Ought had, more precise, more willing to sit in a groove and let it tick, and his arrival quietly rewired the whole thing. Deep in View (2022) was the reset: drier, more paranoid, the guitars scraping rather than ringing. It is a good record that sometimes sounds like a band feeling around in the dark for the light switch.

The Gloss (2024) found it. The songs got hookier and the band tighter, Darcy's lyrics curdling into little office-dread vignettes about surveillance and small humiliations. If they had stopped there, Cola would have been a solid post-punk band with a couple of very good albums and a devoted Last.fm following. Respectable. A bit safe.

The record where it clicks

Cost of Living Adjustment is the one where they stop playing it safe. The title is a joke that doubles as a thesis: COLA, the band's name all along, stands for cost-of-living adjustment, the raise workers are owed when inflation runs ahead of their wages. The album is about getting by, or not, in a system that keeps moving the line. The lyrics are dystopian and openly left-wing, full of loans taken out for impossible dreams and skies that look wrong.

What snapped it into place is two changes. Cartwright started blending live drums with sampled ones, so the rhythm has a machine pulse under the human one and never lets up. And Darcy, one of the more distinctive talkers in indie rock for over a decade, finally just sings. Actual melodies, on songs like "Hedgesitting" and "Skywriter's Sigh," and it turns out he is very good at it. The trick that bands try and usually botch, opening up without losing the edge, Cola pull off. "Polished Knives" and "Fainting Spells" are tense and danceable at once. The dread is still there. They just learned to make it move.

Why the arc matters

This is the kind of band RateYourMusic and Last.fm were built for, the sort you have to follow across years and name changes to really get. Plenty of people heard More Than Any Other Day in 2014, filed Ought under "promising," and moved on. They missed the better story, which is a group that kept its core two members, swapped a drummer, changed its name, and spent another decade slowly turning into a great band instead of a promising one. If you like this corner of guitar music, it sits next to the machine-driven post-punk in our coldwave guide, though Cola are warmer and funnier than that lineage usually allows.

So here is the argument I want to have in the comments. Is Cost of Living Adjustment really their best, or is the early Ought lightning still the peak and this is just the most polished version? Rate the five records above and tell me where the line actually bends. I think it bends here, in 2026, but I have been wrong about this band's ceiling before.