A Tribute to Every Worker Who Never Made It Home, and a Furious Indictment of the System That Let It Happen
Plz Respond release their new single “Gold Rush” today, a raw, driving punk-rock track aimed at the economic systems that treat workers as expendable, and at the governments that let them get away with it. Written by frontman and drummer Galen Crampsey, produced by Logan Treaty, and mastered by Johnny Ross, the song is their most personal and politically charged statement yet, arriving as the latest in a run of singles from a band building toward something bigger.
This one comes from somewhere real. Six years ago, Crampsey was injured on the job when a door frame fell on his neck and fractured a bone in his spine. An injury he is clear could have been easily prevented. As a delegate to the Durham Labour Council, he has since given speeches on workplace safety to politicians, labour leaders, and community members across Durham Region. “Gold Rush” is what a speech cannot be: loud, unambiguous, and built to be played at full volume. “No one should have to gamble with becoming a statistic just to earn a living,” Crampsey has written. “It is unacceptable, and more people should be outraged.”
At the heart of the track is a tribute to the 26 workers killed in the 1992 Westray mining disaster in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, one of the most devastating examples of corporate negligence in Canadian history. Of the 52 charges eventually laid, 34 were dropped. That outcome, and what it says about who the system is designed to protect, runs through every line of the song. The band are explicit: neoliberal economic policy, across party lines, consistently prioritises profit over the people who do the work. “This isn’t new,” Crampsey writes. “Liberals haven’t been far behind in this regard.” Plz Respond do not traffic in partisan comfort. They name the pattern.
The song earns its anger through its specificity. “The bosses they make the rules / miners say the gold’s for fools / they won’t give their lives for jewels” strips the mythology of the gold rush down to its ugly core, while the recurring line “get back that 1950s Cadillac” carries deliberate historical weight: a longing not for nostalgia, but for the era of stronger unions, greater working-class security, and a society that had not yet been fully handed over to the market. The bridge drops any remaining metaphor entirely and addresses the audience directly on behalf of workers everywhere who died because safety training costs money and that money was never spent on them.
Plz Respond are Galen Crampsey (drums, piano/keys, lead vocals), Bryan Crouch (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), Brandon Smith (lead guitar, backing vocals), and David Bunn (bass, backing vocals). Rooted in Oshawa and drawing on the raw energy of the Ontario punk and alternative rock tradition, they play like a band with something real to lose and something urgent to say. They have shared stages at The Biltmore and the Bovine Sex Club, opened for Ill Scarlett, Lear Haven, and Excuses Excuses, and raised funds for the Durham Rape Crisis Centre and the AIDS Committee of Durham through benefit shows. Their politics are not a pose. They live where they write.
“Gold Rush” follows “Budgets and Bootstraps,” the band’s previous single and one of the most direct working-class punk tracks to emerge from the Ontario scene in recent memory. With several more singles on the way, Plz Respond are building a body of work that takes seriously the idea that rock music exists to say things that are true and that nobody else is saying loudly enough.
Hi, Galen! Good to see you again! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Hey,good to see you again too! Thanks for having me back. I am Galen Crampsey, the lead singer/songwriter/drummer of Plz Respond. I also sit on the Durham Region Labour Council, a rank and file member of the IBEW local 353, and participate in several mutual aid projects in the GTA.
“Gold Rush” comes from a very real workplace injury you survived yourself. Was writing this song emotionally difficult, or did it feel more like finally saying something that had been building for years?
It wasn’t emotionally difficult as much as emotionally charged. I was angry, I am angry, I will stay angry until working class people get their well overdue recognition by the ruling class. That recognition looks like wealth redistribution of wealth, democratic control of the economy, the workplace and the natural resources we all have a right to. We are living through a time where the wealth gap is growing bigger than ever before. The consequences of that wealth gap have been compounding since 2008. The collective quality of life for workers takes hit after hit. So yes, its been building for years.
The song references the Westray mining disaster, which still feels painfully relevant decades later. Do you think Canada has actually learned anything from disasters like that?
I think our governments, federal/ provincial/ municipal , all learned what they need to do to LOOK like they learned something from it. Drafting half baked policies to protect workers and their safety and then enforcing them with even less rigor. The fact is, neoliberal capitalism prioritizes business and profit over everything. Safety costs money and that eats into profit, so it’s always on the chopping block. Even when the “rules” are established and the “fines” are laid out. So any real consequences fall by the wayside, especially if they hurt business transactions.
Oshawa has such a strong labour and manufacturing history. How much does growing up there shape the identity and politics of PLZ RESPOND as a band?
My Dad was an immigrant from Scotland, who came to Canada with his 7 siblings and parents who had nothing in their pockets. My Dad was able to get a job at general motors as a tool and die maker. Because of the wages and benefits he received he was able to provide a quality of life for his family we never had. Those things he was able to get because the union fought tooth and nail for them. Through the power of collective action and solidarity, the union lifted the quality of life for Oshawa as a whole. Then after Stephen Harper gave General Motors 9.5 billion dollars to bail them out of the economic crisis created by capitalists, GM shut down in Oshawa and decimated our community. The lessons here are that strong unions make for strong and secure communities and that giving corporations tax payer money is never going to make them prioritize taxpayers over shareholders. So seeing all of that unfold in real time definitely shaped my politics, and I know Bryan, Brandon, and Dave feel the same way about unions and corporations.
A lot of people see rock music today as entertainment first and protest second. Do you still believe music can genuinely change minds or create political pressure, or is its role more about making people feel less alone?
I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. I actually think both things are heavily interconnected. Music, and art in general, can be a catalyst for the growth of feelings and ideas in an individual. If the music or art is powerful enough, if they are relatable enough and ring true, more individuals will share in the same experience. When that mutual experience is shared and the ideas resonate, the feeling of connection becomes powerful. That connection is what destroys loneliness. If the ideas that are shared begin to make people talk and organize around those ideas, then movements start. Those movements begin to demand the attention of politicians. All the forces of capital will always try to crush any ideas that threaten its hold on power. The legacy media, the capitalist class, and the politicians in their pockets will always try and crush those ideas through any means they can. However, if the connection is strong within the movement, and the ideas and concepts speak to real problems the movement is facing, they will resist the efforts of capital, and become a political force. That’s how it works.