Customer Service has a new EP—and it’ll get your head banging

Owen Harris and Max Hayden were working the customer service desk at Quinpool Road’s Canadian Tire, dreaming about making a record. The longtime friends and next-door neighbours had grown up together where Halifax’s south and west ends meet, bonding over emo and punk music, and jamming as teenagers when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down their schools. It was how they learned to play. How they got their start, too, performing at house parties—before they would go on to share the stage with Hollerado, make waves with their debut EP and land a record deal with Toronto’s Royal Mountain Records.

One year after Customer Service’s Live More Forever EP turned the friends—along with bandmates Matt Cheverie and Nick Adams—into one of Halifax’s buzziest new bands and launched them onto the pages of Exclaim!, the foursome are back with their sophomore effort, to you, after 2000 years.

The three-track EP premieres Friday, Feb 14 with a release party on Mar 7 at the Seahorse Tavern. And whether the band’s debut already made you a fan or you’re hearing them anew, their follow-up release is one worth adding to your playlist.

Endings and beginnings

Customer Service’s new EP picks up where Live More Forever left off. The emo/punk band’s breakout single, “Grad Day,” turned high school graduation malaise—“Why is it so hard for me to just let go?” Cheverie sings—into a propulsive, energy-packed anthem. The band’s follow-up EP takes a similar page, weaving songs about seasons changing (“this is the best night of my life!”) with breakups (“and it feels”) and the anticipatory nostalgia that comes with growing up and moving apart (“bury me on vernon street”). It’s a rich vein to tap into, Harris says, speaking by phone with The Coast.

“I think a lot of the time, the strongest emotions that any of us feel is the feeling of people coming in and out of your lives,” he adds. “And that could be friends, relationships, family, whatever.”

Hayden chalks it up to the band all living through a phase of life where “so many people are coming to school and then leaving for the summers, and then going home or getting jobs somewhere else, and then coming back … Like, we have so many friends and relationships that have started and blossomed, and then it ends and transitions, and then people return.”

Customer Service has found a growing following in Halifax’s emo and punk scenes. Credit: Belinda Naugler Adams

The bandmates are getting a taste of leaving home, too: Last fall, Customer Service toured across the Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario, opening for Montreal garage punk-rockers NOBRO at the Marquee Ballroom and playing with Hollerado in Ottawa. (Hollerado’s frontman, Menno Versteeg, signed the band to Royal Mountain Records at the end of 2024.) The foursome are back on the road in February and March, performing in Fredericton, Moncton and Saint John in the lead-up to their EP release party at the Seahorse Tavern on Mar 7.

“All I ever wanted to do was tour,” Harris told The Coast in January, “and to see more parts of Canada and travel around and meet people in bands that I love. It’s been the best ever.”

Customer Service’s to you, after 2000 years is available on 7-inch vinyl and as a digital album. Tickets are available online for their Seahorse Tavern show, with Atay & Jax, Dart Trees and Good Dear Good joining the lineup. Pre-save the EP here.