Photo by Justin Singer
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 13 2026, 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 title is both accusation and admission. I Built This Prison Myself asks what happens when the forces that confine us become internalized— when survival mechanisms harden into walls, and the parts of ourselves we fought to protect begin to resemble the things that keep us trapped. Across the 10 songs on the album, Williams turns those questions over with characteristic urgency: What if the parts of yourself others think are broken are the parts that are most worth protecting?
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.
Pre-order I Built This Prison Myself here.
I Built This Prison Myself cover art:
I Built This Prison Myself track list:
- Blink and See God
- Don't Lose the Feeling
- Jesus Christ Superstore
- Misled Youth
- Error of My Ways
- Fighting
- So Alive I Cry
- No One
- Seeing Red
- Making Peace with the Horrors of Being Me
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