Bad Copy

Ahead of their upcoming debut full-length album, due out in January 2027 on Steady Riot Records, Toronto’s Rawls Royce has released a new single entitled “Woe, Toronto.” The song explores Toronto’s history of class conflict, political violence, and anti-fascist organizing in the 1930s. Amid widespread disillusionment and disaffection, particularly among young men, the song draws on Toronto’s lesser-known history of rejecting reactionary, right-wing politics in favour of collective action to build a better world.

The album is a 15-song concept record about the almost 1,700 Canadians who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Unable to find work in a jobless economy and abandoned by their government in relief camps, these volunteers traversed the Atlantic to fight fascism, and to stop it from spreading back home.

The band shared the following about the new single:

“This is a song about the many struggles of living in Toronto, told through the lens of the malaise of the Great Depression era. Not unlike today, the 1930s were a period of widespread disillusionment with the political, social and economic conditions of the city. The protagonist dreams of running away to Spain to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War. However, the Mackenzie-King government passed the Foreign Enlistment Act in 1937 making it illegal to do so.

The song also takes inspiration from our own experiences living in the city. Toronto is an expensive, commercially-driven city that often has a cold indifference to the humane, particularly artists and working-class people.

Sometimes what we have to tell ourselves to get by in this city that chews you up and spits you out is: If the city doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger. Obviously, this lyric is a cheeky play on Nietzsche’s pop philosophy quote, but we think it’s a statement that serves as cope for our own living and being in Toronto – a city we all deeply love, despite its many flaws and difficulties.”

Alongside the single, Rawls Royce has released a video filmed and edited by ToeKnee Radavoi. The video layers historical footage of Toronto from the 1920s and ’30s over clips of the band performing. It opens with a quote from Buenaventura Durruti, published in a Toronto Daily Star article on August 18, 1936: “We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”

Watch the music video for “Woe, Toronto” below and keep checking back for more from Rawls Royce!