The Armed have returned! The Detroit collective are primed to explode with nuclear force on their sixth outing, the snappily-titled ‘THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED’. But, is the world ready for The Armed once more?
“They’ve asked the same thing every fucking time,” vocalist and co-founding mastermind Tony Wolski guffaws at the consistent reaction to his band. You see, this is because there’s no one doing it quite like The Armed.
Emerging in the late-00s as a mysterious collective, spearheaded by Tony and bassist Kenny Szymanski, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest band came, ahem, armed with their own canon, enticing many into their ambitious ways. Playing out alongside their barrage of ready-to-burn-the-world-down unhinged hardcore, cinematic videos pieced together their mythology featuring the pro/antagonist Dan Green, including a 2019 single, ‘FT. FRANK TURNER’, which featured Frank Carter as the artwork (leaving both bemused).
Their fortune began to take shape around 2021’s ‘ULTRAPOP’ – the second part of a trilogy beginning with 2018’s ‘Only Love’ – which saw the sinewy group becoming ripped, shredded, forms of human perfection and the dedication to their craft finding new heights. But it was on 2023’s ‘Perfect Saviors’ that The Armed properly unveiled themselves. The last few years of spun yarn being laid to bear, Tony became the de facto frontperson alongside a mostly solid lineup taking their show on numerous tours. Now, six albums deep, they’ve toured with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, released an ambitious concert/concept movie (2022’s ‘ULTRAPOP: Live At The Masonic’), worked with their heroes, and even had various sponsorship deals. It’s safe to say The Armed has gone much farther than they ever planned.
“What me and Kenny have learned at this point is it’s a compulsion to keep creating. When we toured with Queens of the Stone Age in arenas and amphitheatres, it was hilarious, within the concept of the band,” Tony explains. “When we would talk to the press on the last one, some people would be like, ‘So what will you do if you play those shows and the crowds don’t like it?’” as Kenny adds, “It’s no different than being in a basement in Detroit.” “Of course they’re gonna hate it,” Tony cackles again. “What are you talking about? This is the funniest thing we’ve ever done. This is fucking hilarious. This, in and of itself, is part of the art. We opened for Bernie Sanders and a bunch of like-minded folks, but a lot of people weren’t ready for what we were.”
“This band will never become famous, and it’s never going to die”
The Armed relish moments where they can push boundaries and test the patience of onlookers. Footage from support tours shows them breaching the audience barrier and confronting the placid crowd – the kind of chaos that can make or break a relationship with a band. So far, nothing they’ve done has managed to destroy them, no matter how hard they try. After 15 years of operating in a cloud of smoke and mirrors, while creating brutal music that draws as much from hyper-pop (before it existed) as it does hardcore, they’ve only just begun to exist in the open.
“This band is never going to break and it’s never going to go away,” Tony cackles once more. “You know what I mean? This band will never become famous, and it’s never going to die. It’s never going to become Turnstile… we’re just doing our shit,” he airs confidently.
With an ever-changing roster supporting Tony and Kenny’s madcap ideas, including Julien Baker, Queens’ Troy Van Leeuwen, as well as metal-titans Converge playing an intricate part, The Armed getting to exist, let alone succeed, to them is hilarious. “Me, Kenny, and Randall [Lee, longtime guitarist] were being walked around the Fender factory, and they were giving us free instruments. That is fucking hilarious,” Tony says, as Kenny adds laughing: “[I was like] have you seen us break these instruments? You should not let us near these.” “We had an amp sponsor that immediately wrote to us after there was a picture of me holding the front end broken off of one of the amps on stage on the Queens tour,” Tony recalls. “On that show Live Nation gave us three strikes… I mean, we’re just doing what we do.”
“It was like, just do whatever the fuck”
Claiming their upcoming stint of shows – including a 2026 UK/EU arena tour supporting Biffy Clyro (after Simon Neil’s Empire State Bastard opened for them in London last year) – will be their rawest and most brutal yet, The Armed are only just getting started. This is a befitting fact given ‘FUTURE’ is an explosive, experimental outing. This time, they’re discarding the conceptual frameworks that defined the past decade, while preserving the sonic evolution – from hardcore antagonists, to ripped pop/hardcore amalgamates, to brazen rockers – only to crush it all again in a tight fist, pumped defiantly in the air.
For their sixth album, they went back to the beginning. Their debut album, a free release in 2009 and now only available to those in the mix of The Armed’s fanbase, ‘These Are Lights’ is their rawest outing. It was this ideology they fed into for their latest. “It was just me and Kenny making this music that we had no idea what it would become,” Tony recalls. “We were calling [‘FUTURE’], ‘These Are Lights… Again’, when we were developing it.” It was that lack of expectation that they were holding onto mostly. Eschewing the concept-led immediate past has freed them up for the future, but never say never in going backwards again: “I’m sure we’ll find some new fucking long tail concept to get looped into for another decade,” Tony laughs.
He likens this new era to a couple of droids from Star Wars: “You know, C3PO and R2D2 had the limiter bolts on them at the beginning of A New Hope. We pulled all those off, and it was like, just do whatever the fuck,” he says of their unharnessed freedom. “The reason it felt like ‘These Are Lights’ is because we’ve brought back some of those colours. We’ve learned a ton over the last decade, but the spirit has always remained the same, which is, we’re just making music for the people that are on the call with you right here,” Tony says.
“Maybe, just maybe, blaming poor people for every single variation of every problem isn’t the right move”
This new era of The Armed has a political thwack to it. If the album title itself wasn’t a good indicator, then the first single ‘Well Made Play’ and its loaded, on-the-nose video certainly cemented the notion. Throughout come spiky lyrics and frenetic sounds that jab at the state of the world, and even when moments lead quieter, such as the penultimate track ‘Heathen’ which offers a bit of breathing room with spacious bass ruptures, before the rambunctious closer ‘A More Perfect Design’. Adding this element was a natural part of that unleashing, but not a planned aspect, as Tony explains, “We’re not smart enough to be a political band, but we’re smart enough to say that maybe, just maybe, blaming poor people for every single variation of every problem isn’t the right move. Maybe poor people have lives that are quite complex and not undervalued to your own. And also maybe in general, war kind of sucks,” he shrugs.
While openly acknowledging several times that they aren’t here to present fixes, or to dissect the problems at hand (“We’re not Rage Against the Machine. I’m not smart enough to sing so specifically”), they know that it has to play a role in what they’re doing now simply because of how far spread the issues are.
Catharsis is a word that could easily be bandied about at this point. Loud, abrasive music, mixed with some form of political leaning, lends itself to this idea, but that’s not The Armed way. That’s too plotted. For ‘FUTURE’, it’s about banging their metal cup on the bars. “I think there’s a huge cultural sense of impotence right now,” Tony reckons. “No one feels like they can do anything, so maybe we’re letting the valve loose a little bit.” It’s this last point that’s the heart of The Armed and what they’ve striven for over the years.
“Art to us is not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks about it”
Who knows where The Armed will end up next? But that’s why they’ve grown such a fevered fanbase. Those with a disposition that craves the unknown and the unabashed relish this concept. “We learned over [the last few years] that we can do anything,” Tony smiles. “I’m happy that we’re creating a project in which I think we’ve earned enough trust with our audience, but frankly, we’ve never ever considered what the audience wants, and we only do what we think.” The fact that they can have the freedom they need in turn eggs them on even more. “It has built people up to having a certain level of acceptance that we do what we want to do, and we can come in and out of brutally insane sounding stuff, and then make a jazz record next,” Tony says.
“Art to us is not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks about it,” he continues. “It’s just doing it for us, and that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re so lucky that there is enough of an audience that we’re able to have the means to do some of these things.”
“It just needs to be as entertaining as possible to us,” Kenny adds. “And wherever that leads to is fine, because, like Tony was saying, it’s hilarious to see all the different upgrades, it’s like we’ve entered a new unlocked door, and maybe we don’t belong there necessarily, but it doesn’t matter. It’s hilarious and funny, and that’s how it should be. That’s how you keep going,” he ends as the pair head off, ready to take on the world once again.
The Armed’s album ‘THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED’ is out now.
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