The Armed performed a killer set at KEXP. Watch the full video above.
The Armed Release Surprise Music Video for "Broken Mirror" (feat. Prostitute)
The Armed released a new album, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED last week and today they are back with a video for “Broken Mirror” featuring Detroit area brutalists Prostitute. The two bands will be sharing the stage together starting August 15th for stops in Boston, New York City, DC, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit.
ORDER THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED
The Armed Release New Album 'THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED'
STREAM / ORDER THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED
Today, The Armed release their new album, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED, via Sargent House.
“…some of its heaviest music yet: visceral, vital, and filled with desperate, righteous anger.” - Pitchfork
“This is the record that we didn’t realize we needed at this exact moment.” - NPR
“The chaos on this new album is thrilling.” - Stereogum (Album of the Week)
“…a hurtling, screaming, overloaded barrage of fury at a 21st-century hellscape.” - The New York Times
After completing a trilogy of albums laser-focused on dissecting artistic authenticity in the Information Age, The Armed began work on new material with no premeditated rules or concepts—favoring only raw expression and urgency to herald a new era for the project. What emerged is a furious and confrontational new album—THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED. Still genre-defying, yet overtly pissed, it's an unfiltered expression of Weltschmerz, the German term describing the anguish of the world’s reality versus our idealized visions of what it should be. “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,” vocalist Tony Wolski explains.
The album includes performances by Ken Szymanski, Patrick Shiroishi, Urian Hackney, Kurt Ballou, Troy Van Leeuwen, Meghan O’Neil, Cara Drolshagen, Tony Wolski, Brian Wolski, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Ben Chisholm, Prostitute, Zach Weeks, Mark Guiliana, Kayleigh Goldsworthy, and Derek Coburn.
The Armed embark on their US tour with Prostitute mid-August before a stint with Biffy Clyro in the UK and Ireland January 2026.
Treblezine Album of the Week: 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.”
Stereogum Album of the Week: The Armed 'THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED'
“It was never about the gimmicks. The spectacle, maybe — it’s hard to imagine seeing the Armed in concert and not being blown away by the overwhelming audacity of their live show, in which an army of wild-looking people team up to bombard you with sonic violence. But before I’d witnessed a performance by the band, before I’d wrapped my head about their reality-blurring lore, the first thing that drew me to the Detroit experimental hardcore collective was the sheer blitzkrieg of their records.”
“With 2015’s Untitled and 2018’s Only Love, the band zeroed in on a brutal and ballistic yet polarizingly art-damaged form of hardcore. Their extremely intense music boasted a kind of blunt-force accessibility. When harnessed by the Armed, visceral force and abrasiveness that might repel listeners in the hands of lesser bands instead became so exhilarating that I could not turn away. These were songs you feel with your whole central nervous system, songs that sound like entire city blocks being obliterated — or maybe the A24 version of that kind of destruction.”
"In that Deafheaven way, there was an artsy, hipster-baiting element to the group’s DNA that inspired skepticism from certain haters. I remember one irate commenter who rejected the band as “FAILED GRAPHIC ARTISTS N MUSICIANS PUTTING THEIR FRIENDS UP TO DO THEIR INTERVIEWS WITH THE AWFUL BLOGS PLAYING ALONG” and their music as “GARBAGE HARDCORE MASQUERADING AS A SHITTY ART PROJECT(OR VICE VERSA).” But none of that mattered when I blasted those early Armed albums. As summed up by my former colleague Michael Nelson — a well-known Deafheaven zealot, granted — this was “complex, adventurous, unexpected, exciting, earth-scorching, trail-blazing music.” By the time I grasped the backstory and glimpsed the scene politics, I had already been bowled over by the songs."