Chastity is for the skids, the headbangers, the freaks— for anyone who has felt trapped inside a place, a life, or a version of themselves that they didn’t choose. Since forming the project in Whitby Ontario in 2015, Brandon Williams has built Chastity around a suburban feeling, creating songs as an outstretched hand, and building community as a way of surviving.
On November 13th 2026 via Deathwish/Dine Alone Records in Canada, Chastity will return with a new full-length titled ‘I Built This Prison Myself’, a record about fighting for yourself. It is Williams’ most narrative work yet, based on a story that has haunted his hometown for generations: the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital and the 1976 fire set by a 16 year old patient who burned down a massive barn on the hospital grounds. The record imagines the boy behind that fire, not as a symbol of destruction, but as a young person confronting fear, powerlessness, control, and the hope to remain himself.
The album’s latest single, ‘So Alive I Cry’, is powerful and introspective and arrives today with a music video directed by Justin Singer.
‘I Built This Prison Myself’ hurtles through melodic hardcore, shoegaze and punk, and arrives on the heels of a whirlwind past few years for the band. There weren’t any venues for independent punk music in their suburban town, so Chastity started throwing shows in a barn in Whitby’s rural outskirts, and people took notice. Before long, punk stalwarts like PUP and Metz were making the pilgrimage to the barn to headline gigs, and profits from the shows went to a regional youth mental health service. Chastity spent the next years touring internationally, including shows with Sunny Day Real Estate, Alexisonfire, Deafheaven and more.
These new songs follow Chastity’s progression from the conceptual mortality of 2018’s breakthrough LP ‘Death Lust’, through the anxiety of 2019’s ‘Home Made Satan’ and the search for happiness on 2022’s ‘Suffer Summer’, to the deeply autobiographical ‘Chastity’ (2024). On ‘I Built This Prison Myself’, Williams turns outward again, via a story from Whitby’s past, to explore questions that remain painfully present today.