Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past Is Still Alive is a Celebratory Measure of Love, Sanctuary and Defiance

In a music industry context, the word “Americana” first emerged in opposition—a country variant that rejected Nashville’s 1990s pop-production obsession with traditional sounds in pursuit of some mythic authenticity. Since then, the work has been to determine what it stands for. Recently, its roots in Black, Indigenous and Latinx music have seen a long-overdue recognition; in 2020, the Americana Music Association defined the genre as pulling from “the rich threads of country, folk, blues, soul, bluegrass, gospel and rock.” The Band, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie are also cited today as early influences, the latter two championed for their anti-establishmentism and enlightened social values—and the former, who’ve also been re-examined for their fascination with Confederate nostalgia. The question endures: What exactly does Americana rebel against, and who exactly are its outcasts?

I bring up this history lesson because Alynda Segarra, the creative force behind Hurray for the Riff Raff, has long been demanding more than acoustics from the thing we call Americana. In Jonathan Bernstein’s 2018 excavation of the genre, Segarra called out its coziness with the very establishment it pits itself against, declaring “these heroes are not my heroes.” Hurray for the Riff Raff’s music is rooted in similar influences, but definitely not bound to them: in their discography, folk paeans like those on Small Town Heroes (which turns 10 this year) stand next to the Nuyorican rhythms of The Navigator.

With their last album, 2022’s Life On Earth, Segarra broke the mold entirely—opening with the synthy power ballad “WOLVES” before flowing into tracks that draw from Bad Bunny and Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Hurray for the Riff Raff not only expands the umbrella of “Americana”; it challenges the very structures on which we hang it, and the legacies of pain that accompany them. On “Ogallala” from their new album, The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra explores that pain with memories of fleeing the cops and hopping trains: “I was in love with my American footprint / Tracks of blood left out in the snow.”

With this mindset, The Past Is Still Alive returns to the folk sounds of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s earliest work, with an electric rock current and a focus on solidarity among the oppressed—as well as a community around Segarra that includes Meg Duffy, Anjimile, SG Goodman, Phil and Brad Cook and Conor Oberst. In a 2015 op-ed for The Bluegrass Situation, Segarra described folk as “music that lifts the human spirit out of the terror and anguish of oppression,” and there is definitely something subversive about this music—as well as the album’s cover, which depicts Segarra reclining in a dry desert bathtub in cowboy clothes, eyeing the camera head-on.

The album opens with “Alibi,” rooted in love and defiance and addressed to an addict. Segarra has often explored the complicated rites of loving, particularly loving those on the edge, and on “Alibi” they pair this with a reminder of the need to take care of yourself. Kind but firm, it seems a direct response to the casual drug use and self-destruction of The Navigator’s “Living in the City”: “You don’t have to die if you don’t want to die.” The Navigator painted addiction as a kind of symbol, a symptom of city suffocation that its leading character Navita had to escape. A few years out and stripped of the veneer of a concept album, The Past Is Still Alive confronts it directly, and focuses on finding an answer.

This is a theme that runs through The Past Is Still Alive — feeling doomed, but finding the will to keep going anyway. Segarra has confessed to fearing their lived experiences were too much for the music industry, too real to take center stage in their work, but on this album, they buck those fears with radical honesty. Quasi-title-track “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive)” charts memories of shoplifting for food and childhood beach vacations, the healing powers of Florida water and Narcan; “Buffalo” compares a new relationship to extinct and endangered species, a pairing of personal and environmental turmoil that still holds fast to optimism. This is a link back to Life On Earth, the sound of growing through asphalt. The Past Is Still Alive, meanwhile, is the sound of making a home in a wasteland. “I’ll jump off this cliff with you, if it means we will survive,” Segarra promises on “Buffalo,” ready to endure the impossible for the sake of a better future. What’s particularly striking is the lightness Segarra delivers these desperate lines with. In their hands, the trauma of the present day is a prelude to the possibilities of a better tomorrow.

That stubborn lightness is especially reflected in “Hawkmoon,” which voices the life-giving power of queer community while holding space for the collective mourning that too often accompanies it, as well as “Colossus of Roads”—a string of psalms for the dispossessed composed in the wake of the Club Q shooting. On the former, Segarra honors Miss Jonathan, an early trans role model whose joyful upending of social norms could never be quelled by the beatings she took. On the latter, their voice quivers between solace and sorrow, calling on muses in the form of the boxcar artist buZ blurr and lesbian poet Eileen Myles. They confess to dangerous desires, letting systems crumble and clothes fall to the floor, promising to “wrap you up in the bomb shelter of my feather bed.” Segarra has said that this song came to them all at once, fully-formed, like some kind of divine message; that it felt like “creating a space where all us outsiders can be safe together.” This space is what The Past Is Still Alive keeps coming back to, what all outsiders come back to in the end. In a hostile world, we find sanctuary in each other.

Annie Parnell is a writer, radio host and audio producer based in Richmond, Virginia. Her writing has appeared in FLOOD Magazine, The Virginia Literary Review and elsewhere. Annie can be found online @avparnell and avparnell.com.