“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."