"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.”