When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, his opponents were desperate to look for silver linings and one popular sentiment arose: maybe we’ll get a lot of great punk protest music. It made sense. Punk protest music became a full-fledged moment in the 1980s during Reagan’s presidency, and the parallels between Reagan’s right wing agenda and Trump’s have been widely documented. But even in 2016, you didn’t need to look very hard to realize that punk bands were already speaking out against the oppressive forces of the American government, and that they would continue to do so even if a less obnoxious, less outwardly-bigoted candidate had been elected. “People who’ve had the privilege to think that this is going to ignite an artistic revolution that hasn’t always been there just speaks to the ability for people to be blind,” Downtown Boys’ Victoria Ruiz told The Guardian for a 2016 feature titled Rise above: will Donald Trump’s America trigger a punk protest renaissance?. “The election pulled the Band-Aid off for the people who could afford the Band-Aid to begin with, and now we see that the blood is flowing.”
Now, eight years later, we’re faced with another four years of Trump, and the same sentiment is arising (followed by the same backlash to that sentiment). And it feels even more misguided to say it now. Punk has been viciously fighting against transphobia, homophobia, late-stage capitalism, police brutality, racism, sexism, genocide, fascism, and even the two-party system itself for the past four years and it will obviously continue to do so unless we see real change. This year alone, we’ve seen countless punk bands standing up for human rights in their songs, on stage, on social media, during interviews, etc, and we’ll continue to see more of that but we don’t need to wait. There are so many recent examples to choose from but here are 10 crucial political punk albums already released this year, before the upsetting outcome of November 5.
SECT – Plagues Upon Plagues
Southern Lord
SECT’s fourth album gets its title from “the literal pandemic, and the metaphorical plague of the political state and the rise of fascism,” but it’s not a protest album. Instead, it’s an album that captures the mournful hopelessness you feel when protesting just seems futile. Vocalist Chris Colohan refers to it as “a funeral rather than a trial.” You can hear in Colohan’s grizzled growls how disappointed he is in humanity, and it’s all set to a sludgy, crusty hardcore backdrop that sounds just as dark and depressing as what Colohan is singing about. It’s some of the most impactful songwriting yet from this supergroup-worthy lineup, and it’s an album that really holds a candle to the members’ multiple canonized projects–Colohan has fronted Cursed, Left For Dead, Ruination, and more over the years; drummer Andy Hurley hails from Fall Out Boy and Racetraitor; and other members have done time in Earth Crisis, Catharsis, Undying, Day of Suffering, and more. (Not to mention Converge’s Kurt Ballou stepped in to mix.) A lot of recent albums have captured the anger, confusion, and unrest that’s been increasingly widespread throughout the first half of the 2020s, but few have captured the utter dread the way this one does.
Ekko Astral – pink balloons
Topshelf
DC band Ekko Astral formed in 2020, put out their debut EP QUARTZ in 2022, and this week they released their debut album pink balloons via Topshelf. The album puts the “punk” in post-punk, it treasures noise as much as it treasures pop, it’s got an orchestral spoken word track called “somewhere at the bottom of the river between l’enfant and eastern market” (La Dispute reference confirmed), it dips its toes into twee pop (“make me young”), and it saves the most epic song for last: a nearly-nine-minute collaboration with Josaleigh Pollett called “i90” that clashes between post-rock build-ups and anthemic singalongs.
Thematically, pink balloons is an apocalypse party. It’s a record inspired by the myriad reasons that it feels like the world is ending, and Ekko Astral remember to have fun with it. Singer Jael Holzman’s lyrics can be scathing and blunt, or full of pop culture references to Bon Iver and Molly Shannon, or delivered in a witty, observational style that she says was largely inspired by Arctic Monkeys. Jael’s experiences as a trans woman are inextricable from her songwriting, but she told Stereogum that she’s wary of the ways people might pigeonhole Ekko Astral because of her queerness and identity. “A lot of people have typecasted us around my trans identity without really listening to the messages in pink ballons when we send it to them,” she said. “This is an album for everybody about universal struggles that should not be put into a box.”
Since releasing pink balloons, Ekko Astral put out “Pomegranate Tree,” a six-and-a-half minute pro-Palestine protest song. “It’s exhaustingly heartbreaking to watch a symbol of your childhood community transform into a symbol for genocide,” said drummer Miri Tyler.
Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven
Epitaph
As the opening track, title track, and lead single of their fourth album, there was no better way to introduce this new era of Mannequin Pussy than “I Got Heaven.” It’s a punk rock battle march that finds Marisa Dabice shouting her way through rage and desire, and it culminates in a shiny, glossy chorus that sounds like it would fit on a late ’90s Garbage record. Obviously a song that wonders “what if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” is making a statement, and this song very much does. It sets the stage for the rest of the album, which ranges from dream pop to hardcore punk with moods and thoughts and feelings that have just as much variety as the music itself.
Marisa has said that, if 2019’s Patience is a breakup record, then I Got Heaven is a record inspired by living with your loneliness and solitude and really getting to know yourself, and all the ups and downs and indecisiveness and contradictions that come along with that. From a couplet like “I want to be a danger/I want to be adored” to the collage of music genres, I Got Heaven pulls you in multiple different directions at once. Thanks in part to new guitarist Maxine Steen (who also plays with Marisa in the side project Rosie Thorne), the album has a greater use of electronics and it finds Mannequin Pussy living out their pop music dreams in a way that they only hinted at in the past on sweetly melodic songs like “I Don’t Know You” and “Sometimes.” But it also has some of the most intense hardcore songs they’ve ever written, like “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” “Of Her,” and the especially groovy “Aching.” It’s a record that refuses to be pinned down or stereotyped, and it’s refreshing in a world that too often wants to fit things into neatly organized boxes. There’s really nothing neat or organized about Mannequin Pussy; they’re a mess, and messes are way more interesting.
Infant Island – Obsidian Wreath
Secret Voice
On their best album yet, Infant Island explicitly address issues like capitalism, the climate crisis, pandemic-related health concerns, and, to quote the album’s description on Bandcamp, “an endless stream of other ongoing crises too numerable to be named.” They also call it “an album about the hopelessness of the slow violent decay of the world.” Produced by hometown screamo legend and past collaborator Matt Michel (of Majority Rule and Nø Man), it’s the band’s most seamless fusion of OG-style screamo and atmospheric black metal yet. Comparisons are still warranted to Majority Rule and other Virginia screamo pioneers like pageninetynine and City of Caterpillar, but it also sounds like if Deafheaven’s Sunbather was condensed into two-minute songs. And like that album, Obsidian Wreath sounds majestic; it perfectly walks that line between heavy and beautiful. Andrew Schwartz of fellow Virginia band .gif from god lends screams to the attention-grabbing album opener “Another Cycle” and “Clawing, Still”; the climactic gang vocals on “Veil” include members of Unearth, For Your Health, King Yosef, Senza, Malevich, Mikau, and more; and Infant Island really stretch their wings when Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval of past tourmates Greet Death add clean vocals to the shoegazy penultimate track “Kindling.” The whole thing just sounds massive and full of intention. It feels like it was built to stand out from the pack and that’s exactly what it does.
Terminal Nation- Echoes Of The Devil’s Den
20 Buck Spin
The week this album was released, we were in the midst of witnessing widely-shared footage of police attacking unarmed protesters who stand in firm opposition to our own government funding the Israeli government as the latter terrorizes innocent Palestinians. Our country looks a lot more like an authoritarian, fascist state right now than any of our nation’s leaders will admit, and Terminal Nation is a band of five musicians from Little Rock, Arkansas who have been calling this spade a spade for years. They’re a hardcore-laced death metal band who march in the footsteps of political death metal OGs like Bolt Thrower, Napalm Death, and Carcass, and their sophomore LP Echoes of the Devil’s Den does not mince words when it comes to the state of modern America. “There is no form for the murder of children,” they scream on “No Reform (New Age Slave Patrol),” and if that’s not clear enough for you, try the songs coda: “Fuck every cop that’s ever fucking lived.” On “Empire of Decay,” they lament that we’ve been “born into a hellscape that’s beyond repair.” War profiteering, the climate crisis, the prison industrial complex, and religion-fueled violence are just a few of the other themes that permeate this album, and Terminal Nation deliver all of this with as much brute force as a great death metal album should have. They also get some help from some very talented guests–Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach, Integrity’s Dwid Hellion, Nails/Terror’s Todd Jones, Sex Prisoner’s K. Kennedy, and Elysia’s Zak Vargas–and it’s easy to see why established veterans like these would all want a piece of Terminal Nation’s pie. They’re doing something that death metal really needs more of right now, and they’re kicking so much ass in the process.
For more on this album, read the band’s track-by-track breakdown.
Bacchae – Next Time
Get Better Records
Bacchae sadly broke up this year, but not before releasing their new album Next Time on Fourth of July week. Some artists choose to release music that week for celebratory reasons, I’d wager that Bacchae picked that week because they either 1) don’t care, or 2) overtly wanted to release an anti-capitalist, dystopian post-punk record the same week that everyone around them is celebrating America. Bacchae hail from our nation’s capital, and they spend a lot of Next Time lashing out against the oppressive societal norms that stem from powerful people in that very city. They also address more introspective topics, and they sing about all of it in a way that comes straight from the heart. It’s in the lyrics, but even more so, it’s in the way that singer/keyboardist Katie McD emotes and the way that her voice truly soars–you can’t fake that kind of emotion. It’s Bacchae’s second consecutive album produced by Jawbox’s J. Robbins, and it finds them dishing out twitchy post-punk with the punk edge of the DC/Dischord scene that people like J. Robbins helped shape. Next Time pairs really well with the new Ekko Astral album, another 2024 album from a sociopolitically conscious DC band putting the punk in post-punk, and what’s really remarkable about both of these records is how much fresh new energy they bring to their genre and scene. Next Time scratches a similar itch as Rip It Up and Start Again-era post-punk, Dischord punk, and newer torch-carriers like Priests and Downtown Boys, but Bacchae never sound exactly like any of those things. They’ve got a personality that’s all their own.
NØ MAN – Glitter and Spit
Iodine
Reviews of NØ MAN albums will probably point out that three of the band’s four members were also in the influential screamo band Majority Rule and vocalist Maha Shami guested on Majority Rule’s “Packaged Poison” from their 2003 split LP with pageninetynine (like I am doing right now), and even though NØ MAN are six years and three albums in at this point, but if you didn’t know any better, you might mistake Glitter and Spit as the work of a rising new band. NØ MAN sound as fired-up on this LP as Majority Rule did over 20 years ago, and it registers as one of this year’s most impactful punk records regardless of any context beyond the music itself. Maha, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, fuels the album with anger directed at the violence that her family escaped–particularly on the show-stealing “Can’t Kill Us All”–as well as various other political, social, and economic systems put in place to fuel moral and ethical corruption. Her fury is palpable, and she delivers it with concise gut-punches that are impossible to hear and not scream along to.
Kharma – A World of Our Own
Flatspot
With their third LP A World of Our Own, Chicago’s Kharma deliver meaty metallic hardcore with a purpose. Every brutal breakdown is matched by pointed critiques of America, systemic racism, or just the general shittiness of the world. Produced by Jon Markson (Drain, Koyo, etc), it sounds hard and crisp. Regulate’s Sebastian Paba shows up to add fire to the gut-punch album opener “By Any Means,” and it’s peppered with samples that further drive home the album’s message, including speeches from civil rights activists Fred Hampton and James Baldwin and a clip of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It’s an album fueled by rage and pain, and you never get the sense that Kharma are posing or posturing. You know sincerity when you hear it and A World of Our Own has it in spades.
Skullpresser – Positions of Power EP
Born Losers
Skullpresser is a political, metallic hardcore band that formed in 2022 with some familiar faces. Mannequin Pussy’s Colins “Bear” Regisford on bass/vocals and The Wonder Years’ Mike Kennedy on drums/vocals are the marquee names, but everyone in this band is a veteran of the Philly hardcore scene: lead vocalist Jared Birdseye and guitarist Dan Zimmerman both played together in early ’10s-era band Burdens, and guitarist Sam Tropio did time in early/mid aughts-era metalcore band One Dead Three Wounded and in No Roses after that. They self-released their self-titled debut EP last year, and now they’ve followed it with Positions of Power, via Born Losers Records (who’s also pairing it with the S/T on vinyl). They came out swinging on the self-titled (sorry), and they sound even more menacing on Positions of Power. Influenced by bands like Converge, Cursed, and The Hope Conspiracy, it offers up five hard-hitting songs that take aim at police violence, elected war criminals, and all types of other corruption within our political and economic systems. They sound as pissed-off and ruthless as any great political hardcore band should.
Ben Quad – Ephemera EP
Pure Noise
Ben Quad’s 2022 debut LP I’m Scared That’s All There Is was one of the most remarkable breakthroughs within the whole mathy, Midwest-style “emo revival revival” that’s been happening these past few years, and the Oklahoma City band are clearly not content to just repeat that album’s formula. They recently signed to Pure Noise, and their first release for the label, Ephemera, takes a leap in an intense new direction. Picking up where their great 2022 standalone single “You’re Part of It” left off, Ephemera finds Ben Quad branching out from mathy Midwest emo and embracing the heavier, slicker, and more dramatic sounds of 2000s melodic screamo. They cite bands like Alexisonfire and Underoath as influences on the new material, along with even heavier stuff like Deafheaven and Orchid, and their math rock side still comes through in the dizzying lead guitar that populates these five songs. It eschews the cringey elements of aughts-era pop-screamo, and Ben Quad use this heavier, angrier approach to get across their contempt for late-stage capitalism, war crimes, and other oppressive, greed-driven forces. It’s a progression and a maturation in more ways than one. It feels like the work of a band who aren’t asking to be heard; they’re demanding it.
For more on this EP, read the band’s track-by-track breakdown.
—
For more of 2024’s many great punk records, head here.