This Friday, Kingston gets a new pop of punk on the radio.
Punk rock band RevZed independently released their new EP, Welcome to the Real World, on Jan. 16. It features four tracks, “Welcome to the Real World,” “It’s All About Me,” “You’re Gonna Hear My Name Again,” and “The Telescreen,” all written by vocalist and drummer Jack Blurton, CompSci ’26. The tracks are red-hot, collecting the musings of a band carving their own niche in the Kingston music scene.
Welcome to the Real World is a culmination of years of effort. Blurton finished writing the songs in late 2023, but it wasn’t until last December the band finished recording them with Open Sessions, a local studio which captured RevZed’s unique sound.
“It took us a lot of time to actually get into the studio in the first place because of balancing performing live [with] our schoolwork,” Blurton said in an interview with The Journal. Though the songs on Welcome to the Real World were finished by early 2025 and performed live regularly by the band, ambitions to record began “around this time last year,” Blurton said.
One of the benefits of working with Open Sessions was being charged a flat rate for three songs at a time, allowing the band to spend “as much time as we felt like” on the recordings, according to Blurton. The recording process can be fraught with indecision.
“You start comparing yourself to your favourite music and thinking, you know, ‘Why doesn’t this sound like that?’ And then other times, you realize that plenty of your favourite artists’ music isn’t perfect,” Blurton said.
“In fact,” he added, “I find that when a recording sounds perfect, that’s when it’s boring.”
Recording enhanced what RevZed was already able to do with the songs onstage. “We can’t really layer vocals [live],” guitarist Haluka Matsuura, Con Ed ’27, said in an interview with The Journal. “So it was a surprise when I first heard the master’s and saw the arrangement.”
The tracks on Welcome to the Real World are far from it, layered with meaning and experimentation. For example, Blurton revealed he wrote “The Telescreen” when the first demonstrations of OpenAI’s Sora app were released online. “It absolutely terrified me,” Blurton said. “So, I wrote a song just as an outlet for that anxiety, and now I’m not feeling so scared of it. That’s the power of music.”
RevZed posing for their new debut album at ‘The Journal’. PHOTO BY JASHAN DUA.
After some laughter and debate, the band unanimously agreed “The Telescreen” was their favourite track from the project.
Releasing music into the community evokes complicated feelings among band members. Guitarist Andrew Nasso, ArtSci ’26, bassist Max Hammer, ArtSci ’26, and keyboardist Callan Robinson, Sci ’26, said they hadn’t even heard all the EP’s masters yet. In general, the mood among band members was joyful, anticipating the release of a project involving years of passion and labour.
Overall, Welcome to the Real World is about “encouraging people not to get sucked into the world of bad news [on] our cell phones all the time, and focus more on their immediate surroundings,” Blurton said. “Go out, be involved in your local community.”
Welcome to the Real World is streaming everywhere as of Jan. 16.
Tags
Debut, new music, Punk rock, RevZed
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