The Armed – THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED
In hindsight, it only makes perfect sense that The Armed’s vocalist, Tony Wolski, is an advertising creative. Since at least 2018’s Only Love, the Detroit group have presented themselves as much as a performance art collective as an actual band, though they are very much the latter—anyone who has seen their live shows can attest to the furious whirlwind of sound that happens onstage. But they’re also the kind of myth-making fabulists who craft their own intricate backstory—involving a contributing member named Dan Greene who they’ve fashioned into a fictional character—as well as inventing their own genre (ULTRAPOP) and leaving any number of clues for listeners to follow in pursuit of an Easter egg, including an EP’s worth of material hidden in plain sight on the sleeve of their last record. But their intentions were always good, if not necessarily transparent; as Wolski told me a few years back, when he was still going by the pseudonym Adam Vallely, the stunts they concoct are “a way to throw people off their guard and maybe make everyone a kid for a moment.”
Despite the dynamic, colorful presentation for their post-hardcore anthems, it wasn’t until 2023’s Perfect Saviors that the band actually did start delivering more overt pop songwriting in their own explosive, sensory-bombing manner. Such a move, for the time being, seems to have only been temporary; The Armed are a band that thrives on aggressive maximalism, and their fifth album, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED, is a return to the incendiary sonic minefield of albums like Only Love. It’s still galaxies apart from a conventional hardcore album, but the sheer aggression of these songs—coupled with its hard-to-misinterpret title—brings them closer to that milemarker than they’ve been in more than half a decade. But this isn’t so much music that speaks truth to power as it screams in the face of a passive shrugging off of our own humanity. Or as Wolski described it in his own singularly eloquent phrasing: “music for a statistically wealthy population that somehow can’t afford food or medicine—endlessly scrolling past vacation photos, gym selfies, and images of child amputees in the same feed. It reflects the dissociation required just to exist in that reality.”
As such, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED doesn’t offer answers so much as a reflection on a seemingly hopeless future as well as high-octane fuel for those enduring it and, lord willing, attempting to actually do something about it. Songs like “Well Made Play” are bottled catharsis at their most potent, a pummeling, tumbling noise rock eruption that invokes Biblical justice amid throat-burning screams and Patrick Shiroishi’s squealing saxophone: “Repent/Be saved/Jugment is coming.” The driving post-hardcore anthem “Purity Drag” climaxes with a gang-vocal chorus of narrators greasing themselves out of responsibility (“There is something wrong/Nothing is my fault“), while the punchy industrial-punk groove of “Local Millionaire” provides a long runway for its ultimate message to the object of its ire to take flight: “Go fuck yourself!“
There’s a kind of purity to THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED that positions The Armed much closer to being a humble punk band than any of their recent albums would suggest. This is, of course, relative; even a blistering, two-minute wrecker like “Kingbreaker” has too many moving parts to simply reflect the sound of a band plugging in together in the same room and bashing away. But the immediacy and sheer physicality of these songs seems to more directly reflect the joyful chaos of their live performances, from a hook-driven rock triumph like “I Steal What I Want” to a manic noisecore eruption in “A More Perfect Design” or an actual pop song with “Sharp Teeth,” featuring Wolski and Cara Drolshagen harmonizing melodically in between the screeches.
The Armed have, in their own way, been on a mission to destroy orthodoxy since their arrival in the 2010s, like a hardcore Terminator sent from the future, armed with augmented reality and access to Times Square display screens. But the intensity and immediacy of THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is something like a return to the basics, offering short, satisfying bursts of cleansing chaos, with the strength of their songwriting still intact. It’s not a statement record any more than any loud, noisy record whose mission statement is “Everything’s fucked!” But it nonetheless confirms an ages-old truth: it’s comforting to hear someone else acknowledge how broken everything is in as furiously loud a roar as possible.
Label: Sargent House
Year: 2025
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The Armed : THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING MUST BE DESTROYED
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