It was never about the gimmicks. The spectacle, maybe — it’s hard to imagine seeing the Armed in concert and not being blown away by the overwhelming audacity of their live show, in which an army of wild-looking people team up to bombard you with sonic violence. But before I’d witnessed a performance by the band, before I’d wrapped my head about their reality-blurring lore, the first thing that drew me to the Detroit experimental hardcore collective was the sheer blitzkrieg of their records.
With 2015’s Untitled and 2018’s Only Love, the band zeroed in on a brutal and ballistic yet polarizingly art-damaged form of hardcore. Their extremely intense music boasted a kind of blunt-force accessibility. When harnessed by the Armed, visceral force and abrasiveness that might repel listeners in the hands of lesser bands instead became so exhilarating that I could not turn away. These were songs you feel with your whole central nervous system, songs that sound like entire city blocks being obliterated — or maybe the A24 version of that kind of destruction.
In that Deafheaven way, there was an artsy, hipster-baiting element to the group’s DNA that inspired skepticism from certain haters. I remember one irate commenter who rejected the band as “FAILED GRAPHIC ARTISTS N MUSICIANS PUTTING THEIR FRIENDS UP TO DO THEIR INTERVIEWS WITH THE AWFUL BLOGS PLAYING ALONG” and their music as “GARBAGE HARDCORE MASQUERADING AS A SHITTY ART PROJECT(OR VICE VERSA).” But none of that mattered when I blasted those early Armed albums. As summed up by my former colleague Michael Nelson — a well-known Deafheaven zealot, granted — this was “complex, adventurous, unexpected, exciting, earth-scorching, trail-blazing music.” By the time I grasped the backstory and glimpsed the scene politics, I had already been bowled over by the songs.
The Armed pushed their conceptual elements to the brink with 2021’s ULTRAPOP, an album cycle where the rollout threatened to overwhelm the music but the music was too overwhelming to be denied. Then, with 2023’s Perfect Saviours, they delivered what band mastermind Tony Wolski called “our completely unironic, sincere effort to create the biggest, greatest rock album of the 21st century.” That endeavor failed on its own terms; Perfect Saviours was good, but it wasn’t as gripping as the albums that came before it, albums that maintained that holy fucking shit sensation for stretches longer than is medically advisable.
Now the Armed are back with THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED. They’ve dispensed with the manifestos and the personnel trickery, and for the first time in years, they’ve written a bunch of songs with no unifying idea. The resulting album is a reminder that this band kicks ass with or without a mythology to dissect. As much fun as all those extracurriculars could be, the Armed’s primary appeal has always been in the thrilling sonic chaos they conjure, not the conceptual chaos that swirled around it.
And good lord, the chaos on this new album is thrilling. From the very beginning, when “Well Made Play” segues from bomb-drop freakouts to free-jazz skronk to a grandiose synth-streaked apocalypse music, THE FUTURE IS HERE presents as the kind of album where you never know what kind of madness is about to materialize. Things keep morphing from there: “Purity Drag,” a piano rock joyride punctuated by maniacal screams of “Nothing is my fault,” is immediately followed by the shredding, shrieking “Kingbreaker,” which finds the middle ground between Queens Of The Stone Age and Melt-Banana. They bash out noise-encrusted d-beat on “Grace Obscure” and lurch their way through a grotesque bog worthy of Couch Slut on “Broken Mirror” (key lyric: “These antichrist Christians sure look more like demons”).
Yet for all its constant upheaval, this album is sculpted and streamlined for maximum impact. “Sharp Teeth” and “I Steal What I Want” are some of the hookiest songs the Armed have ever released. “Local Millionaire” — which climaxes with a hearty “Go fuck yourself!” — connects screamy post-hardcore sounds a la Refused with the hooting, hollering roots of rock ‘n’ roll. “Heathen” masters the heavy shoegaze style that has proliferated in Nothing’s wake and slathers it in saxophone, steering the song’s denouement somewhere odd but epic. By the time the unhinged closer “A More Perfect Design” is racing through fluttering jazz meltdowns, discordant screamo outbursts, and sassy cheerleader chants, the Armed have once again reminded us how many tricks are up their sleeve and how hard those tricks can hit in quick succession.
The title and the fleeting glimpses of lyrical clarity betray the obvious: This is an album born from anger and frustration about the state of a world that has careened into dystopia on seemingly every front. It’s “burn it all down” music, and there’s certainly an element of demolition in these sounds. Yet if THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED conjures the feeling of dynamite and a wrecking ball, you can also hear creativity exploding out of it — ideas materializing at a rapid clip, songs transforming several times over in ways that feel natural rather than haphazard. Just as there has always been beauty in the Armed’s smartly curated ugliness, the joy of creation courses through these anthems of destruction.
THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is out 8/1 on Sargent House.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Debby Friday’s The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life
• Blush’s Beauty Fades, Pain Lasts Forever
• Hard Chiller’s BABY!
• Reneé Rapp’s Bite Me
• $UICIDEBOY$’ Thy Kingdom Come
• Buddy Guy’s Ain’t Done With The Blues
• Freezing Cold’s Treasure Pool
• Mal Devisa’s Palimpsesa
• Retail Drugs’ rECKless dRIVing
• araabMuzik’s Electronic Dream 2
• Wisp’s If Not Winter
• Knosis’ GENKNOSIS
• Emily Hines’ These Days
• The New Eves’ The New Eve Is Rising
• The compilation The Dogs Of Hope
• The compilation Maybe I’m Dreaming
• OK Cool’s Chit Chat
• Spafford Campbell’s Tomorrow Held
• Fox Lake’s New World Heat
• Travis Roberts’ Rebel Rose
• Mansur Brown’s Rihla
• Rex Tycoon’s No Limit 2 Luv
• Nuclear Daisies’ First Taste Of Heaven
• BETWEEN FRIENDS’ WOW!
• Charmaine Lee’s Tulpa
• Eyvind Kang’s Riparian
• Go Kurosawa’s soft shakes
• Ali Sethi’s Love Language
• Chloe Kim’s Ratsnake
• Jessika Kenney’s Uranian Void
• QWAM’s girls aren’t afraid of blood
• Chris Chu’s Accidental Album
• The Warlocks’ The Manic Excessive Sounds Of
• MEMOTONE’s smallest things
• Rosali’s Slow Pain: Live And Solo From Drop Of Sun live album
• Morgan Wade’s The Party Is Over (Recovered)
• Maren Morris’ D R E A M S I C L E (Deluxe)
• Saweetie’s Hella Pressure EP
• Yeat’s DANGEROUS SUMMER EP
• Sofia Kourtesis’ Volver EP
• Indy Yelich’s Fame Is A Bedroom EP
• Car Bomb’s Tiles Whisper Dreams EP
• Sex Week’s Upper Mezzanine EP
• Colatura’s If I’m Being Honest EP
• Veronica Everheart’s Lighter In The Morning (2/2) EP
• To The Grave’s Still EP
• The Albert Square’s Swallow You Whole EP
• Flowers For The Dead’s First Place EP
• Return To Dust’s Speak Like The Dead EP
• Kalie Shorr’s My Type EP
• Laura Groves’ Yes EP
