NØ MAN, the blistering Washington D.C. hardcore four-piece, are set to drop their new album, Glitter and Spit, this Friday via Iodine Recordings. Comprised of punk heroes from Majority Rule, and blessed with the venomous stylings of singer Maha Shami, NØ MAN’s third full-length album is packed to the brim with monster riffs, catchy hooks, and an unbridled passion that successfully haunts and inspires its audience all at once.

“Part of why I wanted to call it Glitter and Spit—the common theme among it—is that it’s my lived experiences,” Shami shares. “Sometimes I think people want to see more women in hardcore, but they fetishize what they want those women to be, and then they’re turned off when they don’t fit a mold. They don’t necessarily want something that’s confrontational. A lot of this record is asserting my existence and my lived experience as a Palestinian and a woman. It’s an emotional record, and I hope that people find power in it.”

And with good reason. Glitter and Spit is both a dazzling collection of songs, and a veritable masterclass in DIY tenacity. Opening track “Eat My Twin” is a bludgeoning rager, while the album’s first single “Poison Darts” feels like a long-lost Pixies-go-math rock jam from hell. Bruisers like “God’s Neighborhood” careen like an emotional freight train milliseconds away from derailment. The airtight songwriting and musical cohesion on display is something most bands could only dream of attaining, a feat Shami credits to the fellas in NØ MAN’s decades long friendship and tenure playing together in their previous band. It also helps that Glitter and Spit was quite literally recorded in-house by her husband, NØ MAN guitarist Matthew Michel, in their home auditory compound, Viva Studio. “The band is family,” she shares. “It’s deeply personal.”

“Can’t Kill Us All,” is perhaps the most personal and tragically prescient track on the album. “These songs are fired from a place of pain,” Shami reveals. “That song is one that people are gravitating to because of what’s happening in Gaza right now. ‘Can’t Kill Us All’ is about being Palestinian and the genocide that’s not just there now because it’s been happening for 70-plus years under occupation, but it’s about my travels there and the loss my family has faced.

“People are asking questions about that song because of, you know, 30,000 dead Palestinians in the last four months, two-thirds women and children, but, you know, the song was written before that. My hope is that this is a turning point, but I don’t know at what cost as far as the atrocities,” she laments. “We have lost family over the years, and we have lost family in the past few months in the West Bank and in Gaza. It’s gutting. Being here and knowing that it’s our tax dollars that are allowing this to happen is beyond me.”

Shami was born in Houston, Texas and is part of the ever-growing Palestinian diaspora. “My parents are refugees; they weren’t allowed to return to their homeland. My mother grew up in Palestine, living among Muslims, Christians, and Jewish people before 1948, when Israel was established. My father went to a Quaker school in Ramallah, Palestine. He was dean of students at Mount Olive (University), North Carolina before I was born. It’s like a Baptist school,” she says. “They used to organize interfaith peace trips going back to Palestine. I used to go visit family, I’d spend summers in Palestine, and I did some elementary school there. It was really interesting because going there as an American you encounter humiliating treatment like many, many hours of interrogation at Tel Aviv airport. I’ve been strip searched. I’ve had machine guns pointed in my face as a child. You’re not able to travel on certain roads because you’re Palestinian. Also in America, you have the privilege of being American, but you’re also taught that you don’t exist in history books. I have major recollections of teachers telling me that I was from Jordan and that Palestine isn’t on a map.”

Channeling a lifetime of personal and cultural erasure into her vocals, Shami’s performance on Glitter and Spit is the epitome of cathartic expression. Raging against injustice is in NØ MAN’s DNA and fuels the bands antics onstage as well. “We played FEST at the end of October,” she recalls, “and we created a banner behind us, and we spent the majority of FEST writing down the names, starting from the youngest, because this was the time period when Biden was questioning the numbers of people who died, so we wrote from the youngest and we didn’t even finish age 5, and we had got to 700 names. I say that because we’re at FEST and it’s a supposed punk fest, and nobody was talking about it. I was like, Why the fuck are we doing this?’

I don’t like to impose how people should or shouldn’t do their art,” she explains, “but most of the things people are singing about are, like, revolution and corrupt governments, and I was like, this is insane. So we played, and we spoke about it, and we had that banner, and it was connecting and, I hesitate to use the word beautiful, but, like, it opened up something. Everyone was very supportive. There was a lot of great conversations and a lot of tears. I say that because it’s like, it’s not normal until someone says something, then people want to engage with it.

“I’ve been fortune to be around very socially conscious punks,” Shami affirms, “but maybe this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the record, about people fetishizing revolution and standing up against things but really, they’re status quo. We’ve had people who wanted to work with us on this record, hear what it was about, and either not want to work with us or ask us to change it. It goes back to, ‘why the fuck are we doing this?’ Of course, we’re not going to change a thing. You want me to change my lived experience?”

It’s hard to celebrate milestones or feign normalcy when there’s prolonged suffering unfolding before your eyes. When unfathomable horrors befall your people, when your adopted homeland helps annihilate your ancestral one, the pain is nearly all encompassing. The scale and depravity of the ongoing genocide in Gaza is unlike anything Palestinians have endured previously. If there is a silver lining to one of the darkest moments in human history, it’s the unprecedented amount of support for Palestinian liberation that’s gained traction recently.

“I was born into this cause, but there’s so many people adopting it and saying no in this moment. They are standing against corruption and power and against occupation. That tells you that at least in public opinion times are changing,” Shami exclaims. “The younger generation is not afraid, and their eyes are open. I spoke at this event recently; it was a punk show, benefit for Palestine they asked me to speak at. I was so thrilled at how intergenerational the crowd was, but the young ones were so informed and vocal, it gives me hope about what’s next,” she says. “I can’t help but attribute it to solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. I feel like something happened where people are able to connect systems of oppression with an intersectional lens and I think more broadly, that the youth are going to be the ones to put us in a better place.”

Glitter and Spit is out Friday on Iodine Recordings and you can pre-order it from Deathwish Inc. Follow NØ MAN on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.

Photo courtesy of Michael Thorn