There was briefly a time in the mid-70s when the prospective unmasking of wrestler Kendo Nagasaki seemed to be all the British public could talk or think about. In December 1975, Big Daddy whipped off Kendo’s famous black velvet disguise to reveal the not-so-famous Shropshire-born wrestler Peter Thornley. Thornley somehow still managed to keep his identity under wraps for a further two years before initiating his own unmasking ceremony at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in 1977. A huge live audience tuned into ITV’s World of Sport to witness history, then the world quickly moved on. Nagasaki was all but forgotten about, aside from sporadic, often underwhelming comebacks that failed to ignite much interest.
What does all this have to do with The Armed, I hear you ask? Like wrestlers, the hardcore Detroit collective have dealt in subterfuge and illusion throughout their sixteen years in existence, performing muscular theatrics whilst hiding behind a collective persona that is not all that it appears to be. Moreover, the recent video for ‘Well Made Play’ features shadowy figures beating each other to a pulp; it would be purest WWE if there wasn’t a squalling sax and screamo vocals competing against each other, while the large tow chain that appears to be attached to one of the combatants and a white van in the distance is communicating something more forbidding. Nevertheless, it’s still essentially kayfabe, the violent play-acting that occurs in wrestling that requires an audience to suspend disbelief. As Roland Barthes wrote: “In wrestling, nothing exists unless it exists totally.”
Making anonymity their schtick has always come with its own risks, especially once they let the cat out of the bag. In 2023, The Armed ‘unmasked’ themselves, driven by an apparent newfound desire for transparency, dispelling any ambiguity about who was involved – except that the major disclosure hasn’t really clarified much at all. The Armed collective are shrewd enough in our refracted technological age to present us with ostensible truths and alternative facts. There are up to 28 players who supposedly come and go in the studio – how transparent! – while the dominant forces in the band could be anyone from the shadowy bunraku figure Dan Greene to Converge’s Kurt Ballou who works on the sound design, or even the iron-pumping advertising creative Tony Wolski aka Adam Vallely who fronts the operation. Is it a cult or just an almighty sonic ponzi scheme? As much as one might try not to care, the will-o’-the-wisp they’ve conjured up is impressive, and it certainly keeps those invested in the project on board and guessing.
That said, the most important ingredient to maintaining interest is the material itself. Nobody comes to the Potemkin village if there’s nothing to look at or do. The Armed have followed up in the best way possible with their sixth studio album, releasing a record that’s charged with intent, upping the noise ante after more pop conscious recent outings, including the celebrity-packed, oddly palatable Perfect Saviors. THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED scans like the angry offspring of Jenny Holzer and The Pop Group, a statement album title that doesn’t hold back. As a commentary on where we’re at, it certainly goes harder than Johnny Boy’s ‘You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve’ from 2006, just in case you were wondering how the neoliberal project is going.
THE FUTURE IS HERE… is formidable – whoever’s in charge. And all talk of “The Armed multiverse” dissolves in the heat of the aforementioned opener ‘Well Made Play’. “Fools! Liars! Heathens! Traitors!” screams Wolski, “Repent! Be saved! Judgement is coming!” It sure is a combative opening salvo that puts other town criers to shame. The new album comes off the back of an apparent trilogy exploring the consumption of pop-culture. It proves it’s a bugbear they’re unable to leave in the closet. This time the focus is on modern America, honing in variously on capitalism’s gaping inequalities, right-wing Christian grifters and the vacuity and stupidity of Instagram. Or as Wolski puts it: “It’s 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.”
These incongruities and contradictions work well with The Armed’s penchant for genre-blurring, where the unexpected is always waiting around the corner, much like the experience of doomscrolling. Hardcore in its more traditional form congeals with ear-melting digital noise on tracks like ‘Kingbreaker’, a title they appear to have stolen from themselves as it previously appeared on their 2009 album These Are Lights, from a time when they were evidently still working things out.
Pop sensibilities more in keeping with Perfect Saviors are back too, packed up in searing slices of mayhem – like on ‘Sharp Teeth’, a track oddly redolent of Manson circa 1997, with all the sinister indie camp that comparison engenders. ‘Local Millionaire’ better embodies their pop horror dichotomy, as contagious as Nirvana and as brutal as Sonic Youth performing their noisiest bebop impressions. ‘Broken Mirror’, too, packs an infectious melody, but it’s buried so deeply in distorted sludge that you need an acute ear to dig it out. If you listen closely you can hear them taking aim at “yacht club socialists / patriot grifters / these wellness confidence men and their cure-all elixirs.”
Perhaps most extraordinary of all is ‘Heathen’, where Cara Drolshagen’s dulcet tones lead us on a vertiginous odyssey of dreampop and drum and bass, before we’re pulverised with a beam of monolithic post rock riding through the middle of it. It’s euphoric and for just a moment it almost projects a sneaking sense of hope. That’s soon dispelled on closer ‘A More Perfect Design’, a battalion of venom, bitterness, cynicism, anger: “Cheap shit. Fake fame. Dead kids. New gains. Bootlegs. Slave-made…” The proverbial mask might be off but The Armed still have us in a headlock, forcing us to look at the atrocities we’d rather turn away from or scroll past.
