REVIEW: The Armed - THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED

All presents: destruction

32:16 // August 1st, 2025 // Sargent House

On “Public Grieving,” the finale of their 2023 left turn LP Perfect Saviors, The Armed broke the fourth wall: “There’s two games we’re playing,” they acknowledged, confirming what devotees of their craft already surmised to be true—up to that point, the band had inextricably stitched their killer, increasingly revolutionary take on hardcore punk to their fancy for performance art, each album doubling as an entry in an ever-unfurling canon of mythologized half-truths surrounding the ringleaders of their operation. In The Armed’s earliest days, membership was strictly confidential—a feat they could only pull off with revolving door agents, intentionally obfuscated press relations, and the backing of an established insider network eager to elevate art over ego. Game-o’-telephone lore then expanded the horizons of the collective’s activity, turning their social-experiment-by-way-of-cacophony into a fully-fledged multi-media entity. At the head of it all supposedly sat one dork named Dan Greene, who assembled the bare bones of ragin’ tunes in MIDI software and outsourced the grunt work to whoever heeded the call to represent The Armed on tape, stage, or film. There’s another Dan Greene, the one who dons that name in their cinematic universe, but make no mistake, these two are not one and the same. Also, you’re Dan Greene. Everyone is Dan Greene. I don’t make the rules—it’s the admission fee of playing along.

If the gambit all seems a tad overblown, bear in mind The Armed committed themselves to this gimmick with paradoxical sincerity from 2015 breakthrough Untitled and 2018 expansion deck Only Love through to their 2021 spiritual opus ULTRAPOP, philosophizing about artistry, authenticity, and actualization on each installment. By that last record, they also teetered dangerously close to self-parody, momentum occasionally hampered by production so ravenous for distortion that it fashioned tinnitus as a hard drug and overdosed while pregaming for its own party. Their style has since become the prime example of the oomph buck wild DAW wizardry can add to conventional compositions—common traits from the past 40-odd years of hardcore, both old-school and post-, get regurgitated through The Armed’s rigs and software to such an extent that basking in any of their studio releases has the same appeal as standing in close-combat range of an amp on 11 and rawdogging its vibrations for set after set after set.

Masochism, you say? That’s in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, and their digitally-affected punk wouldn’t be the first subgenre to get down and dirty with noise as its plaything, either. Magnified appreciation of shoegaze and dream pop carried the band on from ULTRAPOP to Perfect Saviors, a release that, with the benefit of hindsight, scans more like a temporary foray into melodic dance-rock than a permanent pivot point. The Armed’s willingness to try something different was appreciated, but popular consensus ruled the album’s execution frustratingly neutered. That this sonic diversion accompanied a shying away from their steadfast pretense (meta-commentary? real performance credits? The audacity!) began to yield nervous conversations about who and what this masquerade would become on the other side of its secrecy. The Dans are too proficient at songwriting to completely drop the ball there—knowing what’s been up their sleeves in the meantime, it’s easier to appreciate Perfect Saviors as the sedated fence-swing it is—but compared to their other work, its deficiencies in grit and gusto are impossible to ignore. Their follow-up needed heartier meat, stickier hooks, and a more urgent sense of purpose if we were to take them seriously again as a force to be reckoned with.

THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED bears no false advertising. Befitting its all-caps, call to action title, it should come as no surprise that the band sounds reinvigorated, built for the moment, and tantalizingly cutthroat. What may come as a shock is that since The Armed’s irreverent fiction has ceased to be stranger than reality, they’ve aimed their crosshairs on the everyday depravity threatening to steal their thunder. It’s an inherently political statement from a group that before now had largely outlined their guiding ideology in abstract or playful terms, and like all emphatically political releases from previously ambiguous commentators, the album runs the risk of catering to a simplified lens lacking both nuance and longevity. A precursory skim reveals their singled out nemeses are a good deal more durable than that: the weaponization of morality, desensitization to violence, and social seclusion triangulate THE FUTURE’s stomping grounds between matters of conviction, fatigue, and isolation. Instead of scattering elements of these ills to kaleidoscopic ends—⨝ refracting, as their motto goes ⨝—this album sees the band retro-reflect, casting light directly back towards the source of the sins. The beams might even reach their own hallowed pedestals.

In ancient times, sages emphasized the need to know thyself. Some wisdom just doesn’t spoil with age.“One last question remains to enter into paradise / Who are you?” The Armed holler on “Well Made Play,” the sort of album opener that could (and does) evict an underwhelming prior album from rent-free cerebral real estate. Its hulking riffage could pulverize metropolises. Its scathing vocals herald Judgment Day. “You are blind to your own reflection” becomes more than just a damning farewell one-liner under the weight of the song’s collapsed frame—this is The Armed returning with a vengeance, yes, but it feels so unhinged, so direct, that it’s more like a first introduction to their final form, one familiarly devastating but devoid of kitsch. A few self-referential nods remain (including three songs here, “Kingbreaker,” “I Steal What I Want,” and “Gave Up,” that share their titles and nothing else with tunes from the band’s 2009 debut), but they are inconsequential in the face of the music’s refurbished ferocity.

So yeah, burying the lede a bit here, but rippers, rejoice! THE FUTURE’s blueprint pulls from the same mix of high octane punk rock that defined The Armed’s peak output and imbues it with the nocturnal, hallucinogenic atmosphere that’s become more prevalent in their formula ever since the nooks and crannies of Only Love. It’s unrelentingly loud, catchier than ever despite near-total verbal incomprehensibility, and whizzes by at breakneck pace, burning calories until all that remains is a half hour of power as potent as any enshrined high point in their catalogue. Chemistry isn’t an issue either; while the saxophone stylings of Patrick Shiroishi are a relatively novel addition and Meghan O’Neil makes her debut with the collective, THE FUTURE’s lineup retains staples like Kurt Ballou, Troy Van Leeuwen, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Ben Chisholm, Cara Drolshagen, and Urian Hackney. Ken Szymanski and Tony Wolski, co-credited with the songwriting now, may or may not be the government names of real people. Who the fuck knows or cares anymore, especially when the songs are this transcendent of individual identity?

“Kingbreaker” and “Sharp Teeth” were astute choices of singles, each balancing the primal rage and conniving sugar so emblematic of The Armed’s greatest strengths, but that praise of refinement applies equally well to almost every other cut on the record, too. “Purity Drag” and “Local Millionaire” embrace vain caricature in straight-faced and interrogated manners respectively, balancing one another as opposite vantage points of the same bankrupt mentality. “Grace Obscure” and its ungodly beats per minute whirlwind through several abrupt rhythmic switcheroos, each more recoil-inducing than the last. “Broken Mirror,” featuring Prostitute’s Moe Kazra, even warps a feedback-laced interlude into an indispensable mission statement against every haughty hypocrite and amoeba-brained bootlicker you’ve ever had the displeasure of interfacing with.

The roller coaster’s steady, accelerating motion jolts only twice, and not until the record’s final arc; the first time is when “Gave Up” cedes the stage to outlier “Heathen,” a dazzling, sprawling, synth-heavy dream expanse where flesh and machine exist co-dependently in tones both cathartic and deeply lonesome. The other is when “A More Perfect Design” quite literally jumpscares that fantasy and THE FUTURE to a smoldering close, fake-out ending capping off one last throttling plea to hold dear to your compassion amidst a diet of doomscrolling and daily doldrums. If, as the band shouts here, “there are some wars so inhuman that they damn generations,” and we are all spectating one, dreaming of a less cruel alternative feels like a worthy act of rebellion in its own right.

Is it, though? Given the ease and disdain with which The Armed mock vanity activism as a central tenet of our rapidly corroding society, the band’s own history sits at captivating odds with the conclusions they draw here. “Consider what makes you happy / consider what makes you sad / consider what makes you angry / is there overlap?” posits “Local Millionaire,” and sure enough, if you think you have what it takes to independently rewire your reactions to a deluge of headlines normalizing power grabs on civil liberties, Palestinians starving in the rubble of genocide, and egomaniacs playing bumper cars with your livelihood as collateral, I’ve got even more news for you: you don’t. The scope of human disregard hasn’t gotten worse over time per se, but our inundation to it has reached a degree so uncharted and paralyzing that course correction seems nigh impossible, let alone the burden of any one person to tackle.

The Armed don’t hinge THE FUTURE as being the whole (or even a partial) solution, but they know generating friction has therapeutic effects even once conspiracy has run its course. If blood, blindness, and distance are the dominant religions of the day, perhaps commanding a so-called cult in celebration of life, insight, and imminence is no longer a mischievous undertaking, but the only path to preserving your humanity. The line between those two power structures is blurry: lost souls who catch wind of these harbingers’ decibels may flock to their sound for any number of reasons—alienation, curiosity, weltschmerz—but until empathy alone is heavy enough to level the playing field, The Armed know there’s a time and a place for magician’s tricks, and it’s not during an active emergency. Until that brighter tomorrow, their noise resounds, vision begetting action and fire fighting fire. Playing this one game is challenging enough. Pleasure to have you back, Dan. We need all the help we can get.

8.5/10