The Armed, 'The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed' Album Review

The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed, Except For This Album

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One of the great pleasures of engaging with art is performing the legwork necessary to make sense of its message, though every once in a while art is nice enough to cut us a break so we can be couch potatoes. The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed, the sixth full-length album by multi-limbed punk collective The Armed, is such an occasion: a record that does exactly what it says on the tin, and does not coax us onto our asses so much as knock us flat on them, all the better to get us to shut up and listen.

In case you blithely neglect the headlines, shit is as bad now as it’s ever been, and it’s only going to get worse. The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed is practically tailor-made to deflect attempts at rhetorical comebacks to its premise; it’s true that we don’t know for absolute certain what tomorrow will bring, but it’s also true that for the last, oh, 195 days, tomorrow has brought us nothing but complements of misery, absurdity, and atrocity, and not always in equal measure. (Maybe the day after tomorrow won’t be as dreadful.) The point The Armed seem to be making through their title alone is that “tomorrow” has lasted a third of the year—that even if things might turn the corner at some indeterminate date down the line, we’re living in “the future” with every passing second as the world burns and authoritarian degenerates and their freakazoid sycophants dump gasoline on the flames.

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In short, the “future” we think about is just our present. We’re in an extended currency, where time is so compressed that the passage of a single day represents nothing more than a chance to catch some troubled winks before the sun rises. The future, in short, is a shambles. It isn’t even a matter of the Republican administration’s gleeful savaging of democracy, or the mass murder of hungry civilians half a world away in Gaza; when The Armed refer to “everything,” they mean it, because the record’s tracks can be interpreted to refer to anything.

The chorus on “Purity Drag,” The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed’s second ditty, could be joined by any number of bad actors in American society today: said Republican administration, yes, but the talentless, petty divas who broadly make up the conglomerate of influencer culture, too. “Purest of them all, nothing is my fault.” Close your eyes. Dare to imagine. Picture lying idiots like Paul Saladino, Haley Scheich, Jessica Arevalo, or Gary Brecka singing that line in defense of peddling misinformation; how else are they supposed to make a living if not by spewing bullshit on the internet? It doesn’t matter if the raw milk you buy on Scheich’s recommendation is teeming with campylobacter. She didn’t make you buy it. It isn’t her fault! There’s a joyful abandon to the vocals on “Purity Drag,” reflecting these people’s abnegation of consequence for their grift, contrasted by pounding drum beats and the distorted buzz of the guitars and screeching on the verses–anger garnished with blithe irresponsibility.

Maybe the influencers have a point. The internet, after all, is a desolate place, touched on in the album’s third track, “Kingbreaker,” which buttresses the themes of “Purity Drag” while personalizing them. “The liars in the void,” goes the second verse’s primal howl. “My only friends are fucking scum / How are we as thick as thieves and still alone? / In the noise we are all just ghosts.” If the idea expressed here is well-tread, the value is in how it is expressed; we’re more connected than ever thanks to digital spaces, and yet we’re more tribalized and bifurcated than ever, too. Sheer fuzzed-up rage gives that idea new urgency in a moment where American divisions are so pronounced that one could, without fudging the numbers, divide its population into “those who are totally okay with concentration camps” and “those who are not.”

Broadly, “the internet” may be The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed’s foundational motif. Deeper into the record, “I Steal What I Want” refers once more to tropes of digital life: “Lives in a bubble” on the chorus, “We’re stealing everything we want” on the verse. No one pays for anything online, not even top-tier music journalism produced by devastatingly handsome critics; each of us also has our own pocket carved out on social networking apps, where we can curate what we do and, perhaps more pointedly, do not have to confront or heed or deal with whenever we plop down on the can for a doomscrolling session while we evacuate our breakfasts. (For the sake of full disclosure: I, too, once used torrent sites to nick movies and music for free, back in my college days when I had neither funds nor appreciation for the consequences of my actions.)

The Armed bring these notions to a head on “A More Perfect Design,” a nod to the bill of goods tech bros sell to gullible consumers when they drop their latest resource-depleting gadgets on the market (way before they’re actually ready to go on the market, too). The first two verses comprise a “greatest hits” list of everything that’s bad with our world: “Cheap shit, fake fame / Dead kids, new gains / Bootlegs, slave-made / More dead, no graves.” The third maps out survival tactics for digital life, mostly being willful ignorance of the kids and the dead. The fourth? Here, The Armed give us hope, or if not that, at least encouragement for beating back the tide: Don’t let the Republicans or the influencers gaslight you; don’t let the horror in the news trigger your disassociation; don’t accept the status quo. It’s blunt-force exhortation, but bluntness is necessary. There’s a time for subtlety. The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed makes the urgent and outraged case that 2025 is not that time.

The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed, Except For This Album

The Armed’s latest does exactly what it says on the tin, and does not coax us onto our asses so much as knock us flat on them, all the better to get us to shut up and listen.