Written by Shea Roney

“Oh wait, one more fun thing,” Link gasps as she jumps up from the couch and quickly exits the frame of our Zoom call. Right before our chat, her band PACKS released their new single, “HFCS”, along with an accompanying music video. Self shot in Las Vegas with Link’s trademark fisheye lens, the music video is as dizzying as it is addictive; notably dead-on considering its environment. With a knack for charmingly clever music videos, Link embraces the concept of low-budgeteering into her own style of sharp simplicity and pure enjoyment. After a minute or two, she returns to the call screen with a huge grin and an enormous pair of spy goggles covering most of her head. Playing with the long magnifying extension, bringing out her right eyeball to unforeseeable proportions, she tells me that she is getting everything ready to shoot another video, this time spy themed, for the song, “Missy”. Set to play a daring spy and her counterpart arch villain with her awesome new prop, Link’s genuine excitement couldn’t be wavered. 

Madeline Link and PACKS have had a pretty productive past year. With the release of 2023’s Crispy Crunchy Nothing, PACKS redefined the bleak and mundane in the name of charming fixations and fuzzy rock sedation. On top of that was a month-long U.S. supporting tour with Brooklyn rockers, GEESE. Looking into 2024, after a mainland Europe tour, the Toronto band just released their highly anticipated second album within a year, titled Melt the Honey. On a break between tours, Link called me from her family’s home in Toronto, where we got a chance to catch up, discussing her first European tour, recording Melt the Honey, and the stories that she has strung along the way. 

The sound that PACKS has led over their career is a collaborative and textured style of unpolished garage rock, anti-folk and the barebones of pop exceptionalism – spread out within a controlled burn of fuzzed-out clamor. But before the formation of the band, it was just Link. “I was making music in high school by myself, and I was just writing because that’s what I wanted to do when I got home.”  Having played in a few bands with friends, as well as the jangly-pop duo, Triples, with her sister, Eva, Link was attuned with collaboration, but always placed an emphasis on a song’s personal and structural roots. Without a consistent band to play with, “I was writing songs so that I could perform them solo and they wouldn’t sound that different,” she tells me. But with the serendipitous addition of members Noah O’Neil (bass), Shane Hooper (drums) and Dexter Nash (lead guitar) to PACKS in 2021 allowed Link to comfortably take her vulnerable tunes into denser stylistic territories. With a great deal of trust, Links reiterates, “when I got the band, I would write the songs on my guitar, with maybe only a drum beat in mind, knowing that the guys would have really cool ideas for it”. 

With that all being said, that creative premise rang incredibly true when PACKS was billed to support Slow Pulp on a full European tour at the end of 2023. As our call was a week before her departure, Link tells me she was headed over to the mainland, not with her guys, but as a two piece; her boyfriend taking the role of programming drum beats. Looking beyond this hurdle and relishing in the excitement, Link comfortably admits, “this is closer to what PACKS originally sounded like” – acknowledging the leap to that early and vulnerable style she had planned for. “It’s cool, now that we’re practicing for the Europe set, to just hear that the songs can take on any form that they want to.” She continues, “the song can live as many lives as it wants.” When asked as to how she interprets these new formations without embellishment to their meaning, Link admits, “it comes from not really having too much of an iron grip on any of the elements of the song.” As a wide smirk crosses her face, she sneaks in, “variety is the spice of life.” 

Over a professionally tedious eleven day period, the band traveled down to Mexico City, rehearsing hours on end, to culminate what would eventually become Melt the Honey. From there, leaving behind the bustling center, the band took a bus to Xalapa, the capital city of Veracruz, and home of the notorious Casa Pulpa. Rumored to be commissioned by an ambitious grandmother as a place for her grandkids to play, the house, a cornerless entity, became a working home and studio for PACKS to record their new songs. As an architectural feat – an oddity – “It’s honestly a really dangerous place,” Link laughs, almost still in disbelief. “Me, Shane and Noah were sleeping on these platforms that were 14 feet above the concrete floors,” recalling the super tall echo chamber type rooms. “And then they have these poles that you take to get down. Or I think at least mine did, I don’t know if the other guys did,” she says, humored in the image of their gravitational struggle.

These anomalies – an intriguing combination of environmental and equipment failures – only led to what would be Melt the Honey’s greatest strength; its calloused individuality. With the utmost minimal recording equipment, Melt the Honey’s sound remains an established force, with each member’s personal aesthetic baked in. “We rented a drum kit from the only guy that rents drum kits in Xalapa, and we didn’t even use any clicks,” Link says. With the inclusion of various field recordings; a strong Xalapa storm, a love-tempered cat, recording goofs; Melt the Honey is a genuine relic of the time spent making it. “We just performed,” Link recalls. “I just played along for every take. It was a bit grueling after a while, but it was just a lot of fun.” 

Melt the Honey finds the band presenting their laurels in traditional PACKS pageantry – but where it differs from other PACKS projects is its unapologetic trust, both as a band as well as in Link’s personal life. As listeners, we can easily find resonance within a PACKS song – deliberate in relatability, wit and charm in the face of loneliness and personal bummers. But now face-to-face with the project, Link affirms, “it’s not like writing sad songs is the only thing that I do. They’re the songs that tend to have heaviness to them, and so they’re the ones that are fun to play and expand upon.” On that note, she continues, “anything that I’m saying is buried under so much metaphor. I always try to encode things and distract you.” Before we both start laughing, she demonstrates with hand motions, “this is how bad I’ve been feeling for a month, but here’s the chorus.” On past projects, Link’s wording was meant for coping – distancing herself from her most troubling affections. But with new endeavors in her life, most notably, falling in love, Link’s quips and anecdotes have a lighter duty to them. A counterweight – specifically, Link makes clear, “it’s underrated. Well, I think maybe underrated is unfair to say, because artists are usually just quite sad, and they just can’t write happy songs.” She takes a pause, before saying, “I feel lucky that I get to write these songs.”

As Link and I continued our interview, lapsing my line of questioning to sharing stories; her art residency in Mexico City, the criminal Canadian/US visa cost (which I bravely took the heat for), and the time a drunk kid at a PACKS show tried to convince the both of us that I looked just like Hobo Johnson, Link’s excitement for sharing experiences was undeniable. “I find that I can move pretty slow,” she admits. “I process things pretty slowly, and I feel like I’m kind of a slow person. It’s like truly experiencing what is happening. It’s just part of the fun of being alive and I think every single thing that I experience allows me to have a wider perspective.” Going back to, “variety is the spice of life”, Melt The Honey feels like an embodiment of that particular spice that Link has used before, but this time around it feels purposefully heavy handed. As the boldest project of hers to date, redefining comfort in her style and in the direction her life is headed, Melt The Honey blends this new pronunciation of joy with the fixations of the things that she’s come to cherish; a new love, a passion for creating, the opportunity to do it with her friends – and all-n-all, a new pair of spy goggles to show for it.