“What are you rebelling against?”
“What have you got?”
— The Wild Ones (1953)
Not since the Black Lives Matter moment that coincided with COVID 2020 has there been as many messy, hardcore reasons to take up a cause, to take to the streets and protest, as there have been already in 2025. Trans rights, issues concerning the present and future of immigration and abortion, genocide and other US-escalated and -armed conflicts in the Middle East, the Ukraine vs. Russia, the steadily rising power of the One Percent, cutbacks to the NEA, PBS, and universities—not to mention the omnipresence of the military and local police forces escalating all of it. If there’s anything I’ve missed, feel free to picket.
So, to paraphrase Matt Dillon’s Cliff Poncier in the grunge romcom Singles, where are the protest anthems of our youth—the “Fight the Power,” “Joe Hill,” “This Is America,” or “Blowin’ in the Wind” of 2025? These are several very present, future-forward protest songs filling the just-started summer of our discontent. Our hope is that as the steamy season rolls along, additional artists will further fill this space.
Low Cut Connie, “Livin’ in the USA”
Best known for bringing the horny heft of Jerry Lee Lewis’ barnstorming brand of rock ’n’ roll primitivism into the present, Low Cut Connie’s Adam Weiner takes the grandly stringed route with his newly penned “Livin’ in the USA,” a fear-for-the-future tale inspired by the recent cancelation of his concert for The Kennedy Center’s Social Impact Series after the Trump administration’s takeover of the famed Washington arts space. On the subject of his new song, Weiner compares the present-day, all-encompassing wariness of everyone looking sideways at each other to being a child on Halloween. “The seasons are changing, it’s getting darker, and you don’t know who is lurking.”
Bad Bunny, “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii”
If you want to know the difference between the happy-go-lucky surrealist romanticism of Bad Bunny’s bazillion-selling 2022 breakthrough album Un Verano Sin Ti and the trembling trap-jíbaro of 2025’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, start with its en-Español single “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii.” Here, the Bunny sounds like a hot water pipe ready to burst as he seeks connection to the citizens of Hawaii who, like his beloved Puerto Rico, were colonized by US interests, its natives pushed into the streets while their colonizers live high on the fatted calves.
Benjamin Booker, “Black Opps”
Benjamin Booker is a musician reared in the swampy Floridian DIY scene whose primary inspirations are blues god Blind Willie Johnson and glam figurehead T. Rex, who plays a smartly lyrical blend of soulful garage rock and noisy art pop. Booker dropped his third album at the top of 2025, Lower, featuring its distortion-heavy single and opening track “Black Opps.” Cleverly, Booker compares the Black experience of being forever paranoid and living under a microscope (“They’ll kill you while you sleep”) to the willful trauma of playing the newest Call of Duty game. “Can you even call yourself a man if you haven’t helped this country control global politics through hidden acts of violence while eating pizza rolls?” Booker told FLOOD upon the album’s release. “When my virtual country calls me to serve, I’m there.”
Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, “Let’s Roll Again”
Never one to waste previously used lyrics or old-guy activist sentiments, Young and his clanking, grungy new ensemble with guitarist Micah Nelson borrows the fervor that filled his post-9/11 track “Let’s Roll” and revisioned it for a new battle cry—one geared to take down Tesla owner Elon Musk while prodding American auto manufacturers to make safer electric vehicles. Best lyric: “Don’t want no loud sounds coming from the back, spewing macho poison / It’s not a race track.”
clipping., “Ask What Happened”
There’s a lot about the Daveed Diggs–led post-jungle electro-hop ensemble clipping.’s new album Dead Channel Sky that touches more on the sociopolitical than it does their usual topics of exploded-reality expressionism. Take “Ask What Happened.” The lengthy, multi-versed, sung-spoken essay uses so-called upper classicism and the One Percent as a place to start an argument—about how the military industrial complex must be fed, how government-funded revolutions and further revulsions fuel oil price hikes, how oil-bleeding tankers destroy eco-systems—that gets wrapped around disco-inspired metaphors of flashing lights and loud-as-bombs bass bins.
Beyoncé, “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”/“Blackbird”/“The Star-Spangled Banner”
Ever since the end-of-April leg of her live rodeo tour, Beyoncé has filled her stage with American flag imagery, adorner her dancers with stars-and-stripes garb, and commenced her set lists with two of the most poignant, angry moments of last year’s Cowboy Carter. While “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” seeks to fight the might of rejection of every stripe, Bey’s spidery soft take on The Beatles’ “Blackbird” gives that song’s early Civil Rights plea a twang and tang. And for extra added hot sauce, Beyoncé and her ensemble take on Hendrix’s Woodstock version of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Pussy Riot at No Kings Day LA Protest/ photo by Skylar Watkins
Wisp at Bonnaroo 2025 / photo for FLOOD by Christian Sarkine
JPEGMAFIA, “Protect the Cross”
For the usually in-your-face JPEGMAFIA, this torrid track—released as a celebration of Martin Luther King Day, and in time for Trump’s second inauguration celebration—is more symbolically outraged than it is activist-driven or protestably polarizing. There is, however, one great lead line that lets you know where the righteously raging rapper and producer stands: “2025, your politics is a gang sign.”
Kneecap, “The Recap”
Irish-language rappers Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, along with DJ Próvaí—the Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap—are not content to let what happens at Glastonbury stay in Glastonbury. The highly flammable trio known for ranting about Irish republicanism and native language rights, Belfast’s working classes, and Zionist violence released their new single, “The Recap” (produced by nu-DnB maestro Mozey), in the face of being silenced, firing back here with a particularly unambiguous message for Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch.
Amina Claudine Myers, “African Blues”/“Song for Mother E”
Forty-five years ago, free-jazz/gospel pianist, singer, and Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) member Amina Claudine Myers created the wordless vocal lament “African Blues” and the prayerful “Song for Mother E” in dedication to fighting apartheid and ending ecological distress, respectively. On her just-released new album Solace of the Mind, Myers radically strips down her classics as back-to-back back-to-basics instrumentals that still, in their newly near-silent, spacious depths, create socially and soulfully conscious hymns that are more stirring now than they were in 1980.
Public Enemy, “March Madness”
Leave it to the inventors of the modern-day protest song to cleverly find a sporting phrase we all love, welcome in loud students from Harvard, Berklee, and Howard in honor of the Juneteenth holiday, and touch on everything from the sorrowful wealth of school shootings to the levels of hate speech and anti-free-speech sentiment on the university level while poking fun at politicos scared of confronting the NRA. “Kids supposed to have fun, none of this ‘Run for cover for your life, son,’” raps Chuck D on “March Madness”—which later resurfaced as the final track on the group’s album Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025, which was surprise-released last Friday—in a manner familiar to James Brown’s “Don’t Be a Drop Out” from nearly sixty years ago.
Kim Gordon, “Bye Bye 25!”
It wasn’t enough that a solo Kim Gordon, in melodic rock-out mode, had a crit-list top 10 in her 2024 album The Collective and its centerpiece song, “Bye Bye.” Rather than concentrate on the Family Feud–like question of what one might bring on vacation with this new re-recording, Gordon instead rips through a list of items that the Trump administration has canceled or bankrolled, from “diversity” and “housing for the future” in one verse, to “mental health” and “victim”-hood in another.
Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes, “Your God (God’s Dick)”
When Laura Jane Grace questioned the right’s double standard of gender construct with the release of “Your God” by questioning whether the Almighty has a penis, she gave Rolling Stone a logical response: “If you refer to your God as He and Him, but you will not refer to a transgender person with the pronouns that are theirs…that’s just insane.” My guess is that Grace’s upcoming album with her band The Trauma Tropes, Adventure Club, will be equally filled with uneasy queries that offer less simple answers.
Tom Morello, The “Defend LA” event in Echo Park in June
When activist-guitarist and Rage Against the Machine co-founder Tom Morello held a live protest party at the Echoplex in Los Angeles in response to the city’s rampant ICE raids, he made sure it was red-hot and fired up with the aid of equally pissed off artists such as K.Flay, The Neighborhood Kids, and anti-everything-always Pussy Riot—then gave all of its proceeds to The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
Evan Greer, AMAB/ACAB
Everything about Evan Greer loudly shouts “protest.” She’s an author-activist whose work has graced the pages of Wired, while creating grassroots political activations such as #NoMusicForICE. Her punkish bangers and bedroom-pop tunes have become queer anthems for marches against transphobia, homophobia, and surveillance capitalism. And Tom Morello likes her, calling Greer “a heck of a guitar player.” With all that angsty protest cred, it only makes sense that her upcoming 2025 album AMAB/ACAB—which features contributions from Eve 6, members of Rusted Root, The Decemberists, and Downtown Boys, and even the Boston Red Sox’s organist—seethes from every pore.
Terri Lyne Carrington & Christie Dashiell, We Insist 2025!
In 1960, drummer-composer Max Roach, his wife-vocalist Abbey Lincoln, author-lyricist Oscar Brown Jr., and a tight core of their collaborators released We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. I’ve long considered the album to be one of the most important aesthetic and socially conscious works of all time—even in its 2024 re-release. Now, reconfigured by NEA Jazz Master drummer, composer, and producer Terri Lyne Carrington with vocalist Christie Dashiell, We Insist 2025! ups the wattage on the Roach-Lincoln-Brown protest totem, while adding a funky veneer and a few new complaints of their own.
Pussy Riot at No Kings Day LA Protest / photo by Skylar Watkins
