Chastity 'I Built This Prison Myself'

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, 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 return with ‘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?

Chastity’s new record 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 and Deafheaven.

The new record follows Chastity’s progression from the conceptual mortality of Death Lust, through the anxiety of Home Made Satan and the search for happiness on Suffer Summer, to the deeply autobiographical Chastity. Here, Williams turns outward again, via a story from Whitby’s past, to explore questions that remain painfully present today.

I Built This Prison Myself is a story about fighting fire with fire. It is about the people in our lives who fail us, and the terrifying possibility that no one is coming to help. Above all, it asks what remains when everything designed to contain you has failed: Can you still find a way out?