Attending one of The Armed’s shows has meant reckoning with a giant swamp man lugging a card table through the pit. The Detroit-based heavy music brigade got Tommy Wiseau for a music video; their audition tape to become the new lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots featured a shocking amount of hammered dulcimer. When they put out a song called “FT. FRANK TURNER,” the UK singer-songwriter was left wondering how the band got its hands on his unreleased and uncleared vocals. When the Armed did give interviews, they offered the full performance-art treatment — vague identities, elaborately staged locations, an apparently accidental claim that Kurt Ballou of Converge was their puppet master. The questions piled high, concrete answers…
…remained elusive, and—if the performative antics didn’t threaten to overshadow the music—their records were largely left to speak for themselves.
The band avoided transparent authorship on 2018’s Only Love, which married screaming hardcore with synthesizers and melodic pop hooks. Their new album ULTRAPOP is once again filled with maximal and muscular pop bruisers, but this time, the Armed inch away from concept-driven anonymity. The exhilarating lead single “All Futures” arrived with a video that shows how their music comes to sound so impossibly massive: There they are, eight of the members credited as the current lineup, immaculately shredded and sweating it out in a recording studio as they perform their best song to date. Adam Vallely stands front and center, singing about glad-handing capitalist “sacks of shit” before two of his guitar-wielding bandmates start screaming “all futures—destruction” alongside him. Cara Drolshagen shrieks an affirmative and chaotic “yeah yeah yeah yeah,” just across from Clark Huge, a professional bodybuilder whose keyboard-mashing injects a twee melodic hook into the chaotic whorl. Urian Hackney, drummer and descendant of the family Death, is the pummeling centerpiece, making manifest the song’s omen of destruction with force and dexterity.
It takes a village to create ULTRAPOP’s barrage of feedback, guitar solos, twinkling synthesizers, overwhelming percussion, and screams, and the eight-person lineup in that video isn’t even everyone who goes here. At least 19 musicians contributed to the album and its countless layers of noise; melodic and textural details are crammed into every nook. You’ll have to strain to pick out performances by prominent contributors, but it’s undeniable that their work elevates ULTRAPOP. Guitarist Chris Slorach of METZ, now a full-on member of the Armed, is in the mix throughout, and you could swear that the signature jagged and distorted METZ guitar sound introduces “A Life So Wonderful.” Ballou’s guitar lends an explosive, trudging outro to the otherwise fast-paced and nimble “Where Man Knows Want.” Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen plays lead guitar amid the cascading synthesizer breakdown of “Real Folk Blues,” and the album’s final song, “The Music Becomes a Skull,” is defined by the typically imposing voice of Mark Lanegan.
That final track is a bookend counterpart to album opener “Ultrapop,” mirroring its equal parts delicate dream-pop synth melody and harsh blasts of noise. That’s the band’s consistent secret weapon: Like a heavyweight gracefully sailing off the top rope, the Armed’s gift is how they can make such thunderous and discordant music move with finesse. When their sound is at its most excessive—like Converge drummer Ben Koller’s relentless, suffocating percussion on “A Life So Wonderful,” or the full-on shriek that opens “Real Folk Blues”—the band knows how to pull back and find balance and patience elsewhere. Even on songs like “Bad Selection” that lean harder on restraint and coldness, they eventually land an explosive outro and deliver a sing-along “hallelujah.” If ULTRAPOP’s feedback and belligerence are the window dressing, the album’s value appears when they build tension around a hook that ratchets up the adrenaline. It’s the moment when the entire band stops playing for a second on “An Iteration” so they can emphasize that the song’s “young white savior” bro “did it again, did it again, did it again.”
Lyrics like these reveal the general conceptual thrust behind ULTRAPOP—references to unchecked entitlement, greed, digital facades, and being the “actor,” for example. Some hardbound “scripture” came with 100 limited-edition copies of the album, and maybe if you shell out enough money on Discogs, you can attempt to parse their intentions more deeply. When asked about the term “ultrapop” on writer Dan Ozzi’s Substack podcast, Vallely explained the band’s frustration with the “cosplay” and “stagnation” of heavy music. Technology, he claimed, has democratized previously subversive music to the point where everything ought to just be called pop. “Maybe you’re not as hardcore or edgy as you think you are because you can get a Black Flag T-shirt at Target,” he said.
In a pandemic that’s killed off cramped basement shows, hardcore is a subculture with no physical real estate. It’s an awkward moment to be attempting to reach new audiences by circumventing the formula, or calling out these supposed “cosplayers” who have no place to play (or shove or spit). That Black Flag example also hits a little different coming from dudes who, like Henry Rollins before them, have published their fitness routines. ULTRAPOP was spurred by the impulse to critique, but it doesn’t feel antagonistic of the greater canon of heavy music. Their elaborate and very loud efforts to build tension, achieve overwhelming catharsis, and write their most memorable melodies yet feels more like a conversation with a medium they love. It doesn’t hurt that their newfound transparency makes the music feel refreshingly human and relatable. Gains-obsessed beefcakes prodding the tropes and social expectations of heavy music by making an extremely heavy album is the Armed doing what the Armed do best—leading with their performative instincts. That’s commitment to the bit. — Pitchfork