Packs is the no-longer-solo moniker of Madeline “Maddie” Link. After three years, the Toronto-based songwriter is back with a new lineup, a new name and a new record.
Take the Cake plots the musician’s creative trajectory since 2018’s ouch, charting Link’s significant ascent as a lyricist and composer. The project’s formerly restrained writing process sheds the solitary “Packs-with-an-X” cocoon with help from Dexter Nash (guitar), Noah O’Neil (bass) and Shane Hooper (percussion). Packs’ full band format bolsters Link’s distinct vocals and haunting arrangements on Take the Cake, an emotion-driven record tying the old with the new, while attempting to make sense of everything along the way.
For Link, songwriting has long served as a natural outlet for self-expression.
“I’ve always used writing as a coping mechanism,” she told Ears to Feed over a Zoom interview. “In high school, I used to come home and drum until dinner. That’s how I got a lot of my angst out.” That was about the same time Link began posting homespun recordings to Bandcamp, a common narrative for young musicians writing and recording music at diaristic, often prolific rates. But it’s no surprise she has been making noise for so long: Link’s father was in the ‘90s garage rock outfit The Shinolas, and her mother recorded and engineered the first Triples EP, the pop-rock duo Maddie performs in with her sister Eva.
Written in two settings, Take the Cake presents a dichotomy in time, place, subject and perspective. The songs written in Toronto are about “the old.” They find Link grappling with the day-to-day—going on dates, getting bored, having a shitty day at work.
The tracks written in Ottawa represent “the new,” taking on a foggier, more introspective approach while covering post-breakup confusion, profound familial grief and the innate eeriness of returning home. “In Toronto, what was driving me was stuff that was happening at work,” said Link. “My job was so time consuming that I’d finish and that’s all I could really think about, so I’d write a song to squeeze it out of my consciousness. Being at home, the songs were a lot more lowkey.”
For Ottawa-written tracks like “New T.V.” and bleary-eyed opener “Divine Giggling,” Link’s writing is just out of focus, evoking an almost uncanny valley element to the arrangements. The tunes veer left of center, striking as both alien and familiar, like an architectural mockup of a new mall filled with the pixelated silhouettes of nonexistent shoppers.
Toronto-born songs “Hangman” and “Clingfilm” bundle images of sweat-soaked shirts with sliding guitar lines, plastic-wrapped stomachs and breezy chorus harmonies.
The songs encapsulate Packs’ pleasantly on-edge, perfectly off-kilter charm. And while Packs tracks may come easy first listen, they’re lastingly effective by design. “For ‘Two Hands,’ I was humming while I was walking down the street and I was trying to think of a fun melody,” Link said. “I thought it up and hummed it the whole way home and recorded it as soon as I got back. I started playing along with it to formulate it. I turned the whole thing from a major to minor key. I find it hits harder as I’m writing, so I’ll just change it as I go.”
Take the Cake is teeming with Link’s burrowing vocal melodies and unexpected chord progressions, but she offers an extra dimension with outstanding lyrical imagery. “Hold My Hand” recounts the aforementioned biking accident through dense and vivid imagery. Link ties a terrifying collision with a simple request for sympathy, singing: “Backed into a pickup runnin way/Strewn across the streetcar tracks/Voyeurs drinkin Laker Ice yell ‘Hey!/You coulda killed that girl!’”
It’s a striking scene offering a frank, episodic glimpse into Link’s world-building use of clustering, a pre-writing skill she credits learning from her poetry professor, renowned dub poet Lillian Allen.
“I found with every class I took with her, I improved what I was trying to say,” she said. “I was able to say what I was trying to say in the best metaphors I could think of that were not cliche. I would make my own metaphors for my own metaphors.”
Multidisciplinary by both nature and education, Link’s artistry extends to visual art and storytelling. She recently completed an artist residency in Mexico, where she presented a PowerPoint presentation tying seemingly unrelated events into a conspiracy theory about the trapped soul of former Mexican president Pedro Lascuráin.
At the beginning of quarantine, an unexpected death in the family held Link at a creative standstill. “There was this intense grieving that was going on in the whole house,” she said. “I couldn’t write any songs about it.”
While Take the Cake never directly addresses this loss, the record grapples with its moving parts, like cutting ties with an ex (“Silvertongue”), getting better sleep (“My Dream”) and visceral walks around one’s hometown (“Two Hands”). Link’s ability to transport listeners to a tumultuous time or a place of confusion while naturally bridging poetic self-reflection is what sets Packs apart from their contemporaries. Take the Cake lets the chips fall and the cookies crumble, but takes the time to trace each unplanned crack back to its source.