The Armed
The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed
SARGENT HOUSE
Should you dare decide to drop the needle onto a record by The Armed, you’d better be prepared to take a defensive posture as the album plays from start to finish. The Detroit-based band launched their first brutal aural assault with 2009’s These Are Lights and hasn’t retreated since, continuing their shock-and-awe campaign over the course of their next four records as they filled a broadening fanbase of punk-rock fans with a militant giddiness. Meanwhile, terrified bystanders seeking answers for the annihilation became nothing more than collateral damage as The Armed continued on their warpath.
The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed is the sixth and most literal Armed album to date. It’s as if the band—or, more accurately, the sprawling collective of musicians, which here include production guru Kurt Ballou, returning Armed agent Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age, Ben Chisholm, Patrick Shiroishi, fellow punk Detroiters Prostitute, and oodles more)—share an affinity for toughening up their audience, as if running a boot camp. The other sentiment The Armed drive home is rather contradictory: Human civilization is inevitably doomed. To this group, creating a soothing and reassuring mood as the world burns would be a mendacious, cynical ploy that’s diametrically opposed to the tenets of the band’s belief system.
The Armed’s prior album, 2023’s Perfect Saviors, challenged fans to the core with songs that vacillated from raw punk to glossy noise-pop. In the end, the record was uneven and its results were mixed, quite evidently because The Armed tried to experiment with too many disparate musical stylings in one fell swoop of a record. Well, what a difference two years can make. The Future is as sequentially consistent as its predecessor was scattershot. “Well Made Play,” “Purity Drag,” and “Grace Obscure” are impossibly loud and fast-paced—and while that’s to be expected from a hardcore-punk band, many if not most of them can’t maintain a relentless pummeling for more than 90 seconds or so. Compare that to the far more muscular crew of The Armed, whose new effort winds down with a five-and-a-half minute scorcher in “Heathen.”
Somewhat similar in structure to Perfect Saviors, side A challenges listeners with a deafening sound, while side B finds the band throwing down the gauntlet at their own feet to see what they’re able to pull off. Songs like “I Steal What I Want,” “Sharp Teeth,” and “Grace Obscure” don’t disrupt The Armed’s bombast, but they do incorporate more melody and singing than the preceding tracks. “Broken Mirror” is a static maelstrom reminiscent of Atombombpocketknife, while “Kingbreaker” is a chaotic, cacophonous cut that sounds like a soundtrack selection for the recent No Kings protests.
The record’s second track “Purity Drag” notably boasts a sing-along quality and a chorus in which members of The Armed scream, “Nothing is my fault!” For a brazen band that’s unafraid to speak (or yell) the truth, that absolutist assessment is patently false: The Future is the Armed’s fault—and they should be damn proud of it.
