La Sécurité – Snack City
Montréal art-punk collective La Sécurité are back with “Snack City”, the second single from their upcoming sophomore album Bingo!, out June 12 via Bella Union (worldwide) and Mothland (North America). It follows the title track “Bingo” (W08), which mapped out the album’s production values — Renny Wilson engineering, Félix Bélisle and Emmanuel Éthier co-producing, Robin Schmidt mastering — and the collective’s particular brand of frantic, wiry post-punk. “Snack City” takes all of that and adds sugar.
The premise is deliberately simple. Vocalist Éliane Viens-Synnott wrote it while hungry and annoyed by bad pick-up lines, which gives the song two targets to run at simultaneously. She describes imagining “a self-centered character with food stains and a pizza face who spoke without thinking”, and the band ran with it from there — calling out road snacks, dropping food puns, and building to a French-language hunger chant that loops back insistently. The bass drives it, the keys pile on, and the guitars dart around the edges in that specifically Montreal way that suggests no wave and noise rock absorbed and repurposed rather than quoted. What catches my ear is how well the track holds its shape despite moving at speed — the countermelodies could clutter it up but instead they lock in. The full lineup is: Viens-Synnott on vocals and synths, Bélisle on bass and synths, Kenny Smith on drums, Laurence Anne Charest-Gagné on guitar, and Melissa Di Menna on guitar and synths.
The video was directed by Philippe Beauséjour, who also made the cut-out paper animation for “Bingo”. Here he works with touring footage and vintage cookbook imagery — 60s and 90s cookbooks, collage-style, with Viens-Synnott’s face assembled from food components, citing Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Summer as a reference. It suits the song’s energy without trying to illustrate it too literally.
Bingo! is shaping up as a strong record for the collective, and “Snack City” is the kind of second single that confirms the first wasn’t a fluke. La Sécurité’s European tour starts May 16 in Paris — the UK and continental dates run through August. I’ve been listening to this on repeat since it dropped, which is probably all the endorsement it needs.
Tour Dates Europe:
- 16 May — Supersonic Block Party, Paris, France
- 17 May — La Lune Froide, Nantes, France
- 19 May — Le Grand Mix, Tourcoing, France
- 20 May — La Source, Brussels, Belgium
- 21 May — Effenaar, Eindhoven, Netherlands
- 23 May — Dot to Dot, Bristol, United Kingdom
- 24 May — Bearded Theory, Derbyshire, United Kingdom
- 24 May — Dot to Dot, Nottingham, United Kingdom
- 26 May — Oporto, Leeds, United Kingdom
- 27 May — Voodoo Daddy’s, Norwich, United Kingdom
- 28 May — Rotown, Rotterdam, Netherlands
- 29 May — Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany
- 30 May — Immergut Festival, Neustrelitz, Germany
- 02 Jun — Sonic, Lyon, France
- 03 Jun — Intermédiaire, Marseille, France
- 04 Jun — Primavera Pro, Barcelona, Spain
- 05 Jun — Labo des Arts, Toulouse, France
- 06 Jun — This is not a Love Song, Nîmes, France
- 18 Jul — Electric Castle, Banffy Castle, Cluj, Romania
- 25 Jul — Deer Shed, Topcliffe, United Kingdom
- 01 Aug — Waldstock, Steinhausen, Switzerland
- 06 Aug — Haldern Pop, Haldern, Germany
