Chastity

A barn on the edge of Whitby

Chastity started in 2015, in a commuter town east of Toronto with no room for the music Brandon Williams wanted to play. His answer, according to the band's own label biography, was to stop waiting for a venue: he and friends put on independent punk shows in a barn on Whitby's rural outskirts, with proceeds going to regional youth mental health services. PUP and METZ both played those shows. The barn is the origin story the project keeps returning to, and it is not incidental — it explains why a band that reads on paper as a studio vehicle for one songwriter behaves on stage like something built by a local scene.

Williams has kept the geography in the work rather than leaving it behind. Whitby, its subdivisions and its institutions are the recurring setting, and the ethos he gives Dine Alone is blunt enough to quote without decoration: "Life is less shitty if we live it together." Chastity has since toured with Sunny Day Real Estate, Alexisonfire and Deafheaven, which is a fair map of where the sound sits — emo structures, hardcore delivery, shoegaze guitars loud enough to be filed under metal by promoters who need a single word for the poster.

Four records, and the point where the fiction stopped

The run of albums is steady: Death Lust in 2018, Home Made Satan in 2019, Suffer Summer in 2022, and the self-titled Chastity in 2024. Across those, Williams moved from conceptual framing towards something plainer. Along the way he pulled in collaborators from outside the hardcore world — Dallas Green sang on "Vicious Circle" in 2021, and Makeda Francisco appeared on "Drain the Bloodbath" in 2020.

Chastity, released in September 2024 on Dine Alone, was the break in method. Exclaim!, reviewing it on 12 September 2024, called it the project's first fully non-fiction record, drawn from Williams's own years in suburban Ontario, and described it as "a welcome (if scalding) addition to an already impressive catalogue". Williams's own framing was less grand: "It's a record about struggle, about the missing years. It's also a thank you to some people in my life." At thirteen tracks it is the longest thing the band has made, and it ranges wider than the hardcore tag allows — the third single, "Offing", went somewhere close to country.

That album also supplied the songs that now anchor the live set. Setlist.fm's logs have "Chains" and "Children" as the two most-played songs in the project's history, with "Sun Poisoning" next, then "Innocence" and "Manning Hill" — a spread that pulls from across the catalogue rather than leaning on whichever record is newest.

The fire at the hospital

I Built This Prison Myself arrives on 13 November 2026 through Deathwish Inc., and through Dine Alone in Canada. It is ten songs, and it reverses the self-titled album's move inward: Williams goes back to Whitby's documented past for a story most people in the town already half-know. In 1976 a sixteen-year-old patient at the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital set a fire that destroyed a large barn on the hospital grounds. Williams writes the record from inside that teenager's head.

The announcement on 25 August 2026 was explicit about the angle. Williams reimagines the boy "not as a symbol of destruction, but as a young person confronting fear, powerlessness, control, and the hope to remain himself". Deathwish's framing extends it outward: what happens when the forces that confine a person become internalised, when the defences built for survival harden into walls, and when the thing being protected starts to resemble the thing doing the trapping. The title does the rest of the work.

The tracklist runs "Blink and See God", "Don't Lose the Feeling", "Jesus Christ Superstore", "Misled Youth", "Error of My Ways", "Fighting", "So Alive I Cry", "No One", "Seeing Red" and "Making Peace with the Horrors of Being Me". There is a symmetry in the choice of subject that Williams has not laboured in press: a barn burned down by a teenager nobody was listening to, from a man whose own band began in a barn put up for teenagers nobody was listening to.

Where things stand, November 2026

Two singles are out ahead of the album. "Misled Youth" came with the announcement on 25 August 2026. "So Alive I Cry" followed on 7 October 2026 with an official video. Pre-orders have been open through Deathwish since August.

The release itself is being marked small and local: a show at Osler Records in Toronto on release day, 13 November. Four days later the band is in Bristol. Chastity and Turn of Phrase open all five dates of Saves The Day's Stay What You Are 25th anniversary UK tour, announced on 8 July 2026 — Trinity in Bristol on 17 November, Electric Brixton in London on 18 November, the Palais in Nottingham on 19 November, Slay in Glasgow on 20 November, and the Loud & Clear festival in Liverpool on 21 November. Saves The Day are playing the 2001 album in full, which fixes the shape of each evening and leaves the openers a tight, early slot.

Before that, 2026 was spent on the road in Canada. The band played The Grand in Sudbury on 11 April, Metro Hub in Kelowna on 16 April, The Pearl in Vancouver on 17 April and Pawn Shop Live in Edmonton on 23 April, then joined Cancer Bats for the western leg of their Birthing the Giant 20th anniversary run — Red Deer on 24 April, Saskatoon on 25 April, Winnipeg on 26 April. A headline date at Lee's Palace in Toronto followed on 9 May.

The set as it plays now

The 2026 support slots have been short by design. Door and stage times logged for the spring Canadian dates put Chastity in a half-hour window — doors at seven, on at eight, off at half past in Sudbury; doors at six, on at seven, off at half past in Kelowna. That constraint has sharpened the band rather than thinned it out.

Reviewing the Cancer Bats homecoming at Toronto's Opera House on 9 April 2026, where Chastity played alongside Anciients and The Teeth, The Spill Magazine described a brief set of post-hardcore built on waves of distorted and dissonant riffs, landing somewhere between Deftones and post-rock. The detail worth keeping from that notice is about execution rather than atmosphere: the reviewer picked out the tempo changes, the tension the band builds by shifting gear mid-song, and the fact that where it could have come apart, "Chastity would lock in together and stick the landing". For a project named after one person, that is the relevant compliment — the live band is a band.

The UK dates will be the first chance to hear the new material in a room. With a thirty-minute support slot, ten new songs and a back catalogue whose two most-played tracks both come from 2024, something will have to give; the likeliest shape is two or three from I Built This Prison Myself set against "Chains" and "Children".