The Armed are mad as hell, and so they’re not going to take it anymore. After a loosely linked three-album cycle exploring the outer limits of hardcore punk, excessive pop, and the thought of “authenticity,” the cultish, semi-anonymous Detroit collective’s sixth album dispenses with high-concept experiments in favor of one thing extra quick. Constructed round a barrage of blast beats, dissonant guitars, and feral vocal outbursts, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is billed as a spasmodic response to dehumanization and catastrophe. And when it sticks to that first-thought philosophy, it’s an exhilarating success.
The appropriately pithy press launch that accompanied the album’s announcement located it as an “unfiltered expression of Weltschmerz,” a German phrase for the despair that units in when the world as it’s, with all its struggling and distress, can’t match our beliefs. Ours is a planet of trash fires and overtourism, balanced on the precipice of mass destruction; we now have round the clock entry to livestreams of state-sanctioned mass homicide, interrupted by advertising pablum and trip selfies. “Low cost shit/Pretend fame/Useless youngsters/New positive factors,” lead vocalist Tony Wolski screams on “A Extra Excellent Design.” Attempting to metabolize that poison isn’t human. It’s higher, the Armed suggest, to snap. So the album begins with Wolski screeching the apocalypse—“FOOLS! LIARS! HEATHENS! TRAITORS! REPENT! BE SAVED! JUDGMENT IS COMING!”—and maintains that life-or-death vitality for so long as doable.
In these moments, bloody-throated and wide-eyed, the Armed actually do sound very important. That is unvarnished insanity, a person waving his arms on the road nook and imploring Saturday-morning buyers to see the sunshine. “Kingbreaker” begins with a desert rock swagger however beefs up right into a half-speed breakdown with Wolski wailing, feral and adrenal: “My solely buddies are fucking scum…/Within the noise we’re all simply ghosts.” On the frantic “Gave Up,” issues gradual to a heavyweight tempo once more for him to howl “so hollowed out” whereas incongruously melodic background comfort (“However by no means alone”) is all however buried by the noise. These brutal breakdowns are completely distributed throughout the album, like huge fluorescent signposts on a dimly lit street.
The difficulty with state-of-the-union albums is that they usually come off as didactic, and the Armed do clip the perimeters of that minefield often. Wanting round at a world filled with straw males on “Damaged Mirror,” Wolski disdainfully lists them off one after the other: “These Yacht Membership Socialists/These Patriot Grifters/Patriot psalm and their cure-all elixirs/These Anti-Christ Christians positive look extra like demons.” It has the tone of the KLF and the Bush-era archetypes of American Fool, which leaves the track in the course of nowhere. Nonetheless, constructing these caricatures into one thing extra like characters produces among the album’s finest moments. The detestable and judgmental antagonist of “Purity Drag”—“Nothing is my fault/I’m divine”—is a worthy goal, pushed to the purpose of absurdity with their delusions of divinity. “Native Millionaire,” a molten rock track that would nearly garner radio play, has a equally one-dimensonal and (deliberately) self-important narrator who may simply turn into tiresome, however the voice shifts on the final second, ending with a viciously articulated “go fuck your self” that pushes the observe away from mimicry and again towards satisfying, knee-jerk fury.
