BrooklynVegan's 50 Best Punk Albums of 2021

“We decided to call it *Radical* because it cuts a couple of different ways,” Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley says about the title of the Buffalo metalcore band’s ninth album. “It’s radical as far as the personal beliefs I’m expressing as the lyricist of this band, but it’s also radical because it acknowledges that radical changes may need to be made in order for things to ever get better.” Of course, Buckley is aware that “radical” also means different things to different people in 2021. “I was trying to find things that most people in the world can agree on, and what I came up with was ‘fuck cancer’ and ‘I just want to feel good,’” he says. “I don’t think this record will help in the fight against cancer—although I wish it would—but we tried to write something that acknowledges the idea that human beings all long for goodness. But it’s going to require some big leaps of faith in order to make things good.” Below, he discusses some of the album’s key tracks. **“Dark Distance”** “I wrote this in 2019 or maybe even 2018, when I was realizing where I wanted the record to go. I knew that I had an obligation to use my platform for positive things because the world is not a pretty place right now. So, I just had this idea that the whole thing needs to be reset. Pull out the Nintendo game, blow on it, put it back in. And what resets civilization? Historically speaking, a plague does that. So, I started by summoning a plague and then COVID happened. I apologize for that.” **“Planet Shit”** “This is about a kind of old-style French Revolution of the upper-class elite and ruling class. About two months after we recorded the song, the Capitol building was stormed on January 6. I wrote the song to seem like a newscast, so I will say that, yes, I did have some sort of clairvoyant image of the Capitol building being rioted. My guide for the song was Mitch McConnell. He’s the only person I ever see when I’m talking about evil old white people. That’s two clairvoyant things in a row now, so I’m looking into what that means.” **“Post-Boredom”** “I wrote this about what would happen if I died and was reborn. If I had another chance at life, what would I do differently? What would I do the same? It was written during the pandemic, when everyone was bored, so I started thinking about what was going to happen next. And then I actually did get a separation from my wife during the pandemic, so that was a very real second shot for me. But all the songs were written before I was separated, so it ended up having a bigger meaning.” **“Colossal Wreck”** “This one is so fast and so short that I just thought it would be really good to have really memorable, punchy lyrics. Obviously, we’re being ignored by whatever higher power has been looking out for us since the dawn of time. It’s time to realize that we need to make some serious peace here with whatever is running the show because we really fucked it up. It kind of falls in line with ‘Dark Distance’ in that way.” **“Desperate Pleasures”** “Like ‘Colossal Wreck,’ I was just kind of having fun with the imagery here. We’re all lost, so fuck it. Let’s give it back, let nature take over, let’s just stop even trying. Let’s just live with the shit we’ve created and let nature fix it. The mental image I had was of a building on fire. While I’m just standing there, all these people are running past me to the exit. We can fend this off if we want to, but everyone is just running away. Who’s stupider here? Me for standing there, or everyone else for running away? I don’t know.” **“AWOL”** “I thought this song was about something, but then I realized it was about something else. When I was writing it, I thought of it as my vision for what my life would be like when this record is released. But that version of Keith Buckley is not currently in this situation. Maybe he’s happy; maybe he’s not. I don’t know how to reach him because he doesn’t exist yet. But it’s actually not about that. It ended up being about a very specific person and a very specific time. I don’t think anyone reading Apple Music cares about this, so I’ll just say it’s a message to my future self.” **“Sexsexsex”** “That song is about me realizing that I am a very submissive person. That’s a personality trait I have. When most people think of the whole dom-sub thing, they think of whips and leather and stuff like that. The only reference point they have is sexuality. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the power exchange of a dominant and submissive. So, I made this song seem like it’s about sexuality, but it’s not. It’s about an energy exchange.” **“We Go Together”** “Everyone is born into a very specific set of circumstances—a certain time, a certain place, a certain astrology that has never been replicated. Your experience on this earth has never happened before. In a way, you are the only one alive. Everything that you see is your set of conclusions. In a sense, that makes you the source of it all. So, the song is about feeling like you might be at the center of everything. How does that change you?”

We Are The Union is a band with many homes, but is currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Drawing heavily on ska, pop, and punk rock, the band’s 2021 full length, ‘Ordinary Life,’ balances soul crushing lyrics about dysphoria and heartbreak with endless hooks and furiously catchy choruses. The album, which serves as vocalist Reade Wolcott’s coming out as a trans woman, was recorded in secret in a rented house in Joshua Tree with producer Jon Graber.

“We wanted it to be bold. We didn’t want it to be an allusion to anything. We just wanted it to be what it is, like when you see a Renaissance painting called *Man Holding Fish at the Market While Other People Walk By*.” So says vocalist/guitarist Adam Vallely of The Armed about the title of the band’s fourth album, *Ultrapop*. The previously anonymous Detroit hardcore collective revealed their identities with the record’s announcement in early 2021—or so they’d have listeners believe. And while Vallely (if that’s his real name) certainly seems to be involved, along with folks named “Dan Greene,” “Cara Drolshagen,” and Urian Hackney (an actual person and drummer), one never knows. What seems almost certainly true is that *Ultrapop* features guest appearances from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age), Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), and Kurt Ballou (Converge), who may or may not have produced the album. Below, Vallely discusses each track. **“Ultrapop”** “We wanted to open with a track that immediately made clear what our intentions were on this record. We wanted to throw you in the deep end. A big element aesthetically was trying to combine the most beautiful things with the most ugly things: There’s these really nice vocal arrangements that are pretty up-front, and then you have these power electronics and harsh noise accompanying it. So putting this song first is incredibly intentional. If you don\'t like this, you might as well get the fuck out right now.” **“All Futures”** “Whereas ‘Ultrapop’ is throwing you in the deep end, we wanted this to be like a distillation of all the various elements you hear on the album. We wanted it to be very catchy, very cleverly composed, and really good. The first guitar lead is very St. Vincent-influenced, then Jonni Randall’s lead in the chorus has a very Berlin-era Iggy sound. Lyrically, it’s an anti-edgelord anthem. It’s saying that just pointing out your distaste for things is not inherently a contribution. It’s okay to dislike things, but if you’re devoting all your energy to contrarianism, you’re just anti.” **“Masunaga Vapors”** “Keisuke Masunaga was one of the illustrators of the \[anime\] show *Dragon Ball Z*. He had a very distinct style with angularity and noses and eyes. But the song itself is based on Stéphane Breitwieser, who is a super notorious and prolific art thief from France who felt really connected to the pieces he would steal from museums. It’s a super chaotic but kind of uplifting song, and the whole thing is a confrontation about ownership and attribution in art and what belongs to who—and does any of it matter?” **“A Life So Wonderful”** “The title just seemed like a really not nihilistic, not metal, not hardcore thing to say, and it’s applied somewhat ironically to the lyrical content of the song. Dan Greene wrote about 90 percent of it. He always works in this MIDI program that sounds like an old Nintendo game and then we have to apply real instrumentation. Lyrically, it’s about the deterioration of truth as a societal construct and how dangerous that can be. I know, a real original theme for 2021, but that’s what it’s about—information warfare, destabilization, and the eventual numbness that can come from that.” **“An Iteration”** “This song was actually written almost in full during the *Only Love* sessions. But I think we all just felt that it was a bridge too far for that album, contextually—which was a real hard decision to make and made us feel like adult artists. But it’s one of my favorites on either of the records. Ben Chisholm really helped us nail this one and make it stronger. You can hear Nicole Estill from True Widow doubling my main vocal on everything, and then you can hear Jess Hall, who also sang on ‘Ultrapop,’ doing the hooks, because we wanted those to be real poppy.” **“Big Shell”** “Around 2016, we started doing these splinter groups where just a few of us would play in Detroit under different names. We would play material that we were not sure if it was Armed material. This is one of those songs, and we decided it was definitely a good song for The Armed. It’s probably the most rock-oriented track on the album, and it’s really satisfying. Cara wrote the lyrics, but I know she’s speaking about presenting your real self to the world and letting anyone who doesn’t like it deal with it on their own accord, which is sort of the spirit of *Ultrapop* throughout.” **“Average Death”** “This is the very first song we worked on with Ben Chisholm, and it really cemented the collaboration. It’s got this cool angular drum beat and this weird, lurching sort of groove throughout. Ben added a lot of gorgeous synths and the vocal break leading into the chorus. Urian did this undulating blastbeat that gives it these cool accents. But it’s a huge bummer lyrically—it’s about the abuses of actresses in 1930s Hollywood, that studio structure which is unfortunately a systemic issue that has not quite rooted itself out nearly a hundred years later.” **“Faith in Medication”** “The bassline is kinda crazy, and there\'s a guitar solo by Andy Pitcher towards the end. He’s channeling serious \'90s-era Reeves Gabrels—you can hear that the guitar doesn\'t have a headstock. Urian is absolutely beating the shit out of the drums with those cascading fills. Dan is obsessed with the visuals of \'80s and \'90s mecha-based anime where you see the fucking Gundams having some sort of dogfight in space. That\'s how he wanted the song to feel, and I think it absolutely feels like that.” **“Where Man Knows Want”** “The track opens very sparse, and then it quickly lets the normal The Armed reveal itself in the choruses. Not unlike ‘All Futures,’ the beginning clearly owes a lot to Annie Clark. Kurt Ballou is playing everything you hear at the end that sounds like a stringed instrument. He’s the king of playing those heavy chords punctuated by feedback. Lyrically, the song is talking about the creative curse, the obsession with having a new idea and executing it—and tricking yourself into thinking that when you finish this, you can rest. But it never quite works that way.” **“Real Folk Blues”** “Like ‘Masunaga Vapors,’ this song references a real person—Tony Colston-Hayter, who was this legendary acid-house rave promoter from the \'80s who then in the mid-2010s was arrested for hacking into bank accounts and stealing a million pounds. The reason we became obsessed with the story is because he was hacking into the accounts using this insane machine that was like a pitch-shifting pedal taped to something else that basically allowed him to alter the gender of his voice and play prerecorded bank messages that would trick the systems to get into what he needed to get into.” **“Bad Selection”** “This one was largely experimental as we were crafting it. We just wanted to break new ground with something, I think it’s very successful at doing that. Lyrically, it’s interesting because there’s a duality that presents the listener with a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. With the chorus, is it about someone who’s keeping the faith in a better future, or is it about people being blinded by a violent faith in better days that had already gone by? One is really optimistic and one is very sinister, and they allude to real-world things.” **“The Music Becomes a Skull” (feat. Mark Lanegan)** “This takes an unexpected dark and dismal turn at the end of the sugar rush that is the rest of the record. Dan had a specific vision for the vocals that our immediate group of collaborators couldn’t really execute on. We were talking about it with Ben Chisholm and Dan said, ‘We need Mark Lanegan to sing on it.’ I think he meant we needed someone that sounds like that. We didn’t expect to actually get Mark Lanegan. But within 24 hours, we had vocals from Mark Lanegan. As inconvenient as a collaborative effort like The Armed can be, it can also lead to something like this. I mean, I’m singing with Mark Lanegan on this. It’s so fucking cool.”

\"It\'s sort of a defiant statement, but it\'s also about accountability in moving on from something,\" Tigers Jaw vocalist/guitarist Ben Walsh tells Apple Music. \"You can\'t always control how someone else is going to perceive you.\" While 2017\'s *Spin* featured Walsh and vocalist/keyboardist Brianna Collins splitting writing duties, *I Won\'t Care How You Remember Me* includes newly added members Colin Gorman and Teddy Roberts into the creative process, making the band\'s sixth record their most collaborative and sonically adventurous collection yet, and allowing Tigers Jaw to grow beyond their earlier sound and continue to explore new musical boundaries. \"So many bands\' first one or two records are the ones that smash, and then it\'s tough to live up to that for another 15 years,\" says Roberts. \"How do you do that? You got to be good, I guess.\" Here, Walsh, Roberts, and Collins guide Apple Music through the album\'s 11 tracks. **I Won\'t Care How You Remember Me** Ben Walsh: “It is kind of like a gradual build of a song and then it ends with this really intense sort of, you get this big payoff at the end. And it does really set the tone, it kind of covers a lot of different moods that you see later on in the record.” **Cat\'s Cradle** Brianna Collins: “It\'s about friendship and realizing that not every friendship in your life is going to necessarily last forever, but you need to be able to look back on what happened and be accountable for yourself, and also realizing things about that friendship that maybe you didn\'t see while you were in it is also an important factor.” **Hesitation** BW: “This one definitely has the energy of the earlier Tigers Jaw tracks, but thematically, I think it\'s sort of about when you\'re in a relationship and you are picking up on little things, like a slight hesitation before the person responds to something. And you can tell that something\'s not quite right and it\'s sort of the beginning of the end. So it was definitely inspired by some personal experiences of mine, and, yeah probably one of the more raw and personal songs of mine, lyrically, on this record.” **New Detroit** BW: “This was maybe the song of mine that I was least sure of, and I almost didn\'t bring it to the band. Maybe because it felt like more of a departure from previous Tigers Jaw material. But I showed it to everybody while we were together at Teddy\'s house in Detroit doing some demoing and everybody saw the vision for it.” **Can\'t Wait Forever** BW: “The line ‘I can\'t wait forever’ is part of a lyrical lineage in the Scranton music scene where that line pops up in multiple Tigers Jaw, Menzingers, and Captain, We\'re Sinking songs. We\'ve always, over the years, kind of snuck it into songs sort of like an inside joke. And this song sounds and has the energy of like classic, early Tigers Jaw. It reminds me of the earlier days of the band, and so it felt fitting to kind of put in that little local tribute to the bands we came up with into that song.” **Lemon Mouth** Teddy Roberts: “There is light to all of this; you can always find some positivity in almost anything if you choose to. The song floats around a natural minor key and then you get to the coda of the song—this huge, major feeling. It\'s almost a ray of sunshine that you waited three and a half minutes to get to.” **Body Language** TR: “I feel like the extended outro is a perfect example of when you come see Tigers Jaw live, you\'re going to get the end of \'Body Language\' for an entire set. The spirit of the end of this song is kind of our vibe. That\'s the energy we\'ve channeled by touring for so long and being around each other for so long.” BW: “It feels like the whole song is building towards the release at the end. And it was almost like we didn\'t know how long to extend it on the record and it feels like it could have been selected down or it feels like it could have been five full minutes of it.” **Commit** TR: “I\'m biased because I\'m doing some crazy shit on the drums, it\'s obviously really fun for me to play. It\'s like an earworm kind of tune. Those choruses are just soaring, and it\'s also very deceivingly heavy, especially in the guitar department, it\'s very thick and chunky on a low end, which is a fun look for the back half of the record.” BC: “This might not necessarily have been a song I would have written for myself to sing, because I\'ve never necessarily felt like a lead singer, I think partially because I love harmonies and I love singing harmonies. But writing this allowed me to kind of step up and see what I\'m capable of.” **Never Wanted To** BW: “There\'s sort of like a dual guitar solo at the end that was two different takes, two different guitar solos that were recorded separate from each other that were then kind of blindly added on top of each other. And the idea of that was sort of inspired by my love for Black Sabbath, which you wouldn\'t hear this song and think Black Sabbath, but there\'s a few guitar solos that Tony Iommi does that are multiple guitars layered and sometimes they\'re doing the same thing, sometimes they\'re doing different things and they sort of weave in and out of each other. And so I was trying to capture that aesthetic and just put it in a completely different context.” **Heaven Apart** BC: “It\'s a love song. I\'ve been in a relationship for a very long time, and a lot of it has been spent not in the same place because of touring or school or whatever other obstacles that keep people apart. And it\'s a theme that\'s been sung about so many times, but I wanted to write about it for myself, and I love how the keyboard is the kind of most present instrument, too.” **Anniversary** BW: “This song was one of the later ones that I wrote for the record, and it kind of combines a lot of influences that make up who I am as a songwriter. The kind of chord structures of the chorus and how it\'s played is sort of a nod to my love for Tom Petty.” BC: “I love a record where the last song can end and the first song can begin again and it just feels right.” TR: “I always felt like this song had a closer vibe to it, and I brought it up a couple times here and there, but it felt like a grand finale of sorts. There\'s no other way I can imagine ending this album than with the \'Anniversary\' chorus.”

the cursed album

A decade after Willow Smith taught us how to whip our hair back and forth, the genre-bending artist is still just getting started. Her sound has evolved from bubblegum pop hits to alt-R&B to, now, a full pop-punk album. However, her transition into the genre shouldn’t be surprising, since rock runs in her blood: Her first introduction to the medium was from being on the road with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom in the early 2000s. Then the multi-hyphenate talent experimented with rock-adjacent sounds on tracks like “Human Leech” from her 2017 album *The 1st*, and more prominently on her 2020 album *THE ANXIETY*. All of these moments set the groundwork for the singer’s fifth studio album. Created and recorded during quarantine, *lately I feel EVERYTHING* is an homage to the touchstones of 2000s pop-punk, such as blink-182, Avril Lavigne, and Fefe Dobson. The opening track “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” is an upbeat, energetic, angst-ridden anthem with a mix of clean and distorted guitars backed by booming drums courtesy of blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, who assists on two other tracks on the album. For every angsty pop-punk like “Gaslight” and “G R O W”—which features none other than Lavigne herself—there’s a heavier metal-influenced track like “Lipstick,” “don’t SAVE ME,” or “Come Home,” showing WILLOW’s growth not only as a singer but as a songwriter.

Commitment is messy. After five releases that swayed between plaintive indie-punk and the pull of alt-country, Downhaul has finished their decision dance. PROOF, the Richmond-via-Greensboro quartet’s sophomore LP, definitively steps towards a sound tangled in the dense mystery of the South rather than trailing the anthemic reaches of their contemporaries. Commitment is messy, uneven, and difficult—but commitment is a clear choice. With PROOF, Downhaul has chosen to be without equals at all. It’s a distinction you can prove. Vocalist Gordon Phillips (he/him) has always existed in his own lane, delivering lines with a sharp drawl that punctuates Downhaul’s repertoire of self-reconciliation. It’s here that the band—bassist/vocalist Patrick Davis (he/him), guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Robbie Ludvigsen (he/him), and drummer/vocalist Andrew Seymour (he/him)—finally shapes the surroundings to match. PROOF was worked through twice in demos before it was brought to the studio, and moments like seven-minute opener “Bury,” with its hymn-like pacing and post-rock dribblings, benefitted from the extra tweaks. Even “Standing Water,” where Downhaul 2.0 tries to match its earlier indie-rock heights, feels sturdier and more lived-in despite any switchbacks Phillips rattles off with a sly smile. PROOF’s leaps forward in focus — coming through sharpest on the sweat-choked shine of “Circulation” and the fingerpicked sparseness of “The Ladder” — are met with returning producer Chris Teti’s (TWIABP, Fiddlehead) understanding of the band’s core ethos, tying tracks together with seamless and evocative transitions. Downhaul’s a group aware of its own history. PROOF’s sauntering closer, “About Leaving,” takes its name from their 2017 EP, when Richmond basement shows crafted their swerving beginnings. Because of that internal knowledge, their compass keenly points to a clear future, where the naturalistic terror of growing older meets the pavement over which most of us learn to move on.

Revelation:186

All songs written and recorded by The Best of the Worst Engineered by Joe Dell'Aquila, Jason Selvaggio, and Joe Scala Mixed by Jeremy Cimino Mastered by Ed Hall Cover photo by Dana Yurcisin Layout by Mike Sosinski TBOTW is Jason Selvaggio – vocals, guitar, baritone guitar, acoustic guitar Joe Scala – vocals, drums, percussion, keyboard Liz Fackelman – vocals, trombone, keyboard Garrett Weber – guitar Ryan Edwards – tenor and baritone sax Ryan Kosinski – bass

I Want To Live My Life was recorded between September of 2019 and May of 2020 at The Warming House with Greg Lindholm. Released by Acrobat Unstable. Thank you for caring about our band.

The Horrible and The Miserable; an album by Death Goals. Death Goals is Harry Bailey and George Milner. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Tom Hill at The Bookhouse Studios in August 2020. Photography by Gabriel Wilson.