Even after 14 years of concealing themselves behind a meticulously crafted aura of mystery and what many might call “a sense of anarchic irony,” The Armed's precise lineup hasn't exactly cleared up any misunderstandings over their identity since the Detroit punk band (and pranksters) came out. While Tony Wolski and Cara Drolshagen are confirmed members (I think… you know what, I’m second-guessing myself right now), many others seem to be stand-ins—musicians and friends from other bands who fill in as needed. It recalls an earlier time when the band intentionally kept their lineup vague. They've maintained their old antics, particularly when it comes to using stooges and stand-ins for press appearances, photos, and music videos.
This time, however, the people they're using are much more intimately familiar to us, like when Iggy Pop played the role of God in the music video for their song "Sport of Form." The playful subversion has extended to the band's fanbase, fostering a unique sense of belonging. The Armed's ambiguous lineup has fostered a collective identity, making the group synonymous with a political and beautiful catharsis that anyone can join, regardless of who they are. It is with that collective identity that the band now finds itself being put to great use with their latest full-length, The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed.
The Armed has always been an outlet for political activism; after all, you can’t be punk and still worship the capitalistic machine and the fascist powers that be, but on this album, the band's anger is palpable, like plumes of flaming liquid rock. With the first single, "Well Made Play," the band clarifies their aims. The song's refrains of "Fools, liars, heathens, traitors / Repent, be saved" and "Judgement is coming (Indelible futures)" parody and replicate modern Christian extremists’ apocalyptic prophecies. The song pierces the radicals' facade of faux concern about one's own deception and insecurities, exposing it as a means of instilling fear in others while maintaining a false sense of moral superiority.
Looking back at the high points of this record, many will eventually realize that The Armed is in a fortunate position, both in their career and as a creative unit. For years, their sound design—heart-attack-inducing, suffocating, and highly compressed—has been a point of contention. However, the tracks off of The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed show that they have turned what some consider their greatest weakness into their most formidable strength. These songs demonstrate that their unorthodox style is not a weakness but rather a conscious and creative decision, distinguishing them from a significant portion of heavy music bands and enabling them to collaborate with a wide range of gifted artists, from noise rock newcomers Prostitute to one of the best improvisers of the decade, Patrick Shiroishi.
The band's trademark blown-out sound—forged by the legendary team of Ben Chrisholm, Kurt Ballou, Justin Mendel-Johnson and others—is still not for the meek or the claustrophobic. But while most of their previous records could have done away with this compression, it is now definitely necessary for the sound of this album. This album cannot exist without it. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the record's sound is similar to having multiple tabs open on your desktop, each playing a random, completely unrelated YouTube video. After all, the sound of this album is like if a 2013 RackaRacka video (before they became world-class horror directors, of course), a movie clip from that one scene from the film Whiplash (2014), and old footage of Ryosuke Kiyasu banging a snare drum all over a table as nearby onlookers watch in awe, all amalgamated at once.
However, this incoherent combination of sounds, styles, and nonsensical vocal drivels are merged into a seamless whole thanks to the band's distinctive compression. "Kingbreaker," for instance, is so much more than just "two minutes of piss and fury anchored to an earworm vocal hook," as some publications have claimed. The track also feels like a homage to the Armed’s 2009 album These Are Lights, perhaps because of a similarly named track. The vocal hook—where the chorus repeats the line, "Everyone’s an alien, soaked in glow, decaying skin, only love oblivion, I don’t wanna play again"—functions almost like a form of self-conviction, as if the song is trying to persuade itself of its own message. Stylistically, it sounds like something The Mars Volta might have conceived during their Frances the Mute-era, but with Punch vocalist Meghan O’Neil’s dissonant screeching and Wolski’s melodic traipses replacing Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s vocals. It’s a miracle none of their throats gave out mid-song.
What's even more miraculous, though, is The Armed's sonically disfigured rendition of "I Steal What I Want," a track that fuses the sounds of an early 2000s emo band with The Cure. The song's rigid, dark, and groovy basslines sound like a lost demo from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987), while its pop-rock guitar tones and stanzas are a clear nod to Underoath. What makes this combination even stranger is the history of the track. The guitar leads, recorded by Queens of the Stone Age's Troy Van Leeuwen, were specifically crafted to sound like a mix of The Cure's Robert Smith and King Crimson's Adrian Belew. Even more surprising is that the song, as revealed Wolski in an Apple Music interview, initially began as a space-rock track before transforming into the explosive piece we hear today.
Speaking of Queens of the Stone Age, whether or not it was intentional given Van Leeuwen's contributions, their influence is present in countless tracks on The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed. Listeners can hear vocal inflections and sonic coarseness reminiscent of albums like the abrasive Songs For The Deaf (2002) or the impassioned ...Like Clockwork (2013) on songs such as "Purity Drag" and "Local Millionaire." This demonstrates how The Armed are more adept than ever at smuggling their influences in and then utterly restructure them into something nearly unrecognizable and entirely unique.