Detroit-based collective The Armed return with their abrasive and frenetic new album, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED, a raw sonic assault acting as a visceral examination of our chaotic contemporary world. Moving away from the conceptual frameworks of their previous trilogy, this release emerges as a direct and instinctive response to the overwhelming global crises, cultural gaslighting, and pervasive paralysis that threaten human existence. Vocalist Tony Wolski positions the album as a desperate plea against dehumanization, urging listeners to trust their fundamental moral instincts in the face of blatant injustice and resist the pull towards numbness.
In this interview, Wolski explores the album’s origins, explaining the intentional shift toward a non-conceptual, “more punk” style that focuses on raw sound and visceral impact over intellectual artifice. He discusses rejecting “toxic positivity,” the challenge of addressing complex topics like genocide within a promotional cycle, and the band’s ongoing commitment to artistic freedom, regardless of recognition. Wolski also discusses the development of long-gestating tracks like “I Steal What I Want,” the collaborative spirit involving bands like Prostitute, and the deliberate discomfort created by the album’s visuals, all while reflecting on the loss of the band’s anonymity and his current view of the heavy music scene.
The merch for the album features a statement: “Don’t let it make you go numb. Don’t let it dull your compassion. Don’t let them tell you you’re wrong.” Meanwhile, there are ICE raids all over the country, and the fucking Army is in LA. I’m wondering if your message reflects the current need to stay resilient amidst increasing chaos and hostility. Despite the challenges and negativity, the theme seems to be about not giving in—is that a subtext for this new release?
Absolutely. We completed a trilogy of albums focused on the art itself. It was about niche art and gatekeeping in a world where gatekeepers were becoming obsolete. The gatekeepers and their kind didn’t realize it yet. Everyone had access to everything, and it was about proving those boundaries were outdated and trying to flip what we were doing.
When we started, the goal was to reflect on where pop culture was headed. Through this trilogy of albums, we went from playing unannounced open mics—one of the dumbest ideas we ever had, and a complete disaster of a tour. By the end, we played arenas with Queens of the Stone Age. It was about using what’s happening in culture to insert ourselves into these absurd places. We were pushing ourselves as far as we could, with the aim of using the format to promote more overt positivity, both sonically and lyrically.
We tried to break the format because part of the idea was that as these labels become obsolete, the concept of what hardcore or these extreme forms of metal are also dissolves, depending on how you see it. No one’s view of art matters more than another’s, and that’s what’s beautiful about it. You believe whatever the fuck you want, play what you want, and that is your interpretation of it.
We were trying to break the format. On Only Love, we mostly wrote in all major keys—major scales and stuff—on purpose. We started shifting the message away from telling people what to do. It seemed like hearing more voices giving directions wasn’t the vibe, so it became more about no solutions, “only love.” I still firmly believe that and think it was the right thing to do.
Now, though, I think what’s emerging is the possibility of toxic positivity. If you only get offered positivity, you need someone to acknowledge that things are actually messed up, especially when you see it with your own eyes every second of every day. Someone might be saying, “Everything’s cool, man,” but it’s obviously not.
A key rule for this album was to avoid preconceived conceptual goals, which marks a significant shift from our approach over the past eight years. What developed was mainly a visceral reaction to current events and a plea for everyone to stop losing their humanity. If you see kids being murdered, starved, and slaughtered in large numbers, and think that’s bad, you’re not stupid or uneducated; it’s obvious it’s wrong. No matter what, that is wrong.
I believe there’s massive cultural gaslighting happening from all directions right now. And it’s this urge to try to use those situations—Not everything is about some deep philosophical or logical reasoning. It’s OK to feel upset when you see kids being killed and believe that’s wrong. That feeling is valid in and of itself, without a fancy explanation. One central idea on the album is not to let people stop you; don’t let it all make you go numb. Don’t let the intensity and scale of it make you think there’s stuff you don’t understand about a conflict or situation.
If you’re humble about your existence in this world, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know all the time. But there are also fundamental truths. Abuse of power and constant, nonstop exploitation of people is wrong, period. That’s it. I don’t need any fancy code or system of ideas to tell me.
There are bad things, and it’s alright for you to think they’re bad when you see all the chaos happening around you all the time. We may still not have any solutions, and perhaps that makes us seem uninformed. That’s OK. Sometimes there’s value in saying: “Hey, you’re not going crazy! I feel the same way.”
As we’ve discussed already, the decision to approach the project from a non-conceptual standpoint stands out. What else might make this album different from previous releases?
The Armed, as a somewhat shapeless group of collaborators, views things differently. We’re not doing many press interviews about this one. It’s about letting the music speak for itself.
I think the topics it covers are a bit scattered. But it would be strange doing heavy promotional games and stuff about an album dealing with genocide or the exploitation of the poor. I don’t buy that. I enjoy conversations like the ones we’re having; we’re not caught up in the rat race. It’s more about putting out the record. The Armed has no plan to stop, no matter who cares about us. We’re just doing our thing.
It’s the same in many ways. Sometimes, it feels difficult because some of the things we discuss internally with the band or the collective of artists are about what we’re doing next all the time. So, it doesn’t feel different. However, I completely understand—For those who aren’t having day-to-day conversations about the art, it may seem like a different perspective.
So I believe this is the first time in nearly eight years, we’re revisiting a lot of language we haven’t used in a long while because we were laser-focused on this particular statement, which was what peaked with Perfect Saviors—turning hardcore into a pop band, which I feel no one believed we would do, but we went ahead and did it.
And so, there’s a bit of dusting off some of the vocabulary we haven’t used in a while, but with, in my opinion, very new formats and approaches. So you’re basically revisiting some old material, covering all the new stuff too, and leveraging a decade of accumulated expertise and skills. We’ve all grown a lot as artists. It’s great to revisit some of that.
I could show you hundreds of pages—no joke—of Google Docs, man, a fucking manifesto. The FBI would probably freak out. It’s the ramblings of a madman. We would pass back and forth these kinds of things because we wanted to ensure we were doing something incredibly unique, which sounds funny coming from a band.
I know the band is all over the place, but conceptually, it’s very unified. This was the first time we thought, “No,” if we’re going to put any guardrails on this, think of it like a mixtape. I don’t think it ended up being a mixtape, but that was the idea.
Think of it like a mixtape, so we’re not preoccupied with what we’re creating. We’re just making something. It doesn’t mean we’ve lowered any standards. If anything, the standards are higher now because, similar to a stand-up comedian, the goal is to evoke an unintended response. Laughter often happens by accident unless it’s fake. That makes it a challenging art form.
And I think that’s what we were doing with this: removing all the intellectual pretenses about why critics might say, ‘OK, this is The Armed,’ and we’ll give them a chance. We’ve been fortunate, and people give us the benefit of the doubt. I’m so thankful for that.
But also, let’s create some stuff we want to hear. And that sounds good in a very primal way. I think that’s what makes it different—It has a very different approach, like we were trying to appeal to our most basic instincts. You don’t need to trigger those pleasure centers. We aimed to produce an anti-conceptual piece by the end of it. There’s still a manifesto that accompanies it. But it originates from a very different place.
It’s born from focusing on the direct medium first, which is the sound waves hitting your ears, rather than building it from dozens of mood boards, magazine clippings, and treatises on what other artists have done. We’ve spent the last decade working with a very art school-oriented approach, and this was made a lot more punk.
I got an advanced copy yesterday, listened to it twice, and loved it. It starts strong and pulls me in immediately. You have some gems here, like “I Steal What I Want” and “Local Millionaire,” which demonstrate how a band can be both abrasive and catchy—a remarkable feat.
“I Steal What I Want” has been around for a long time. OK, this song is probably from the same era as the song “An Iteration,” which was also a long time ago. That song, “An Iteration,” was on our album Ultrapop, which was released around 2020 or 2021. So, it was probably written around 2014 or 2015. But at the time, it didn’t fit with anything else we were doing. And honestly, it wouldn’t have been good if it did. We needed to grow to become what it is today.
And the same thing with “I Steal What I Want.” We could never crack the nut of how to get some of these popular things to land and match specific ideas and themes back in 2015. I think that song has matured over time now. It’s funny how that also came to light with Mark Juliana playing the drums.
So, it’s a one-take recording, similar to the first take of a song, with the drum machine used to escalate the groove, which was cool. And Troy, his guitar playing, has a Robert Smith-like lead in the second verse.
And then there’s almost this like Frippy stuff towards the end. It takes the song to the next level. Much of this is similar to many of our songs. They exist for a certain amount of time, and then it finally clicks. A exists in about an 85% form where we’re like, “We know this kicks ass. We know this fucking rules.” But there’s always a small thing that happens when writing a song, eventually making us feel, “OK, now it really kicks ass!”
And that’s what “I Steal What I Want” was about. We’ve had that song floating around for the last decade, but it finally clicked. “Local Millionaire” is another song we were working on. We were recording Perfect Saviors. I recall writing the vocals before recording the guitars for “Modern Vanity” in L.A., as we’re always working on everything simultaneously. I think that came together while recording this last album. Our friends in Metz disbanded—a band that’s near and dear to my heart. I feel like we channeled a lot of their vibe in that song. It’s definitely our own thing. However, we incorporated a couple of elements from Metz into that song, which they very much inspired.
“Broken Mirror” is a collaboration with the band Prostitute. Their new album, Attempted Martyr, came out last year. They’re new, from Dearborn, Michigan, where I live. They’re literally my favorite band. You have to check them out. Prostitute, Attempted Martyr. It’s an unbelievable record.
Do you sometimes help out bands you love by having a member or a group participate on a track or join you on a tour?
While we’re not a huge band, in our limited way, we certainly try to help bands we like. Our upbringing in Detroit was quite different, and the surrounding scene didn’t fully embrace us. We had some friends and advocates, but the people who truly supported us were the real old heads. Tesco Vee from the Meat Men was into the stuff we were doing. But, like, no one in the more “GenX” punk scene seemed to care. It was all very insular, and it wasn’t really supportive of us.
So we’ve been trying to be as aware of it as possible. We may not have a significant platform, but we do our best to help anyone we genuinely believe in. Prostitute does not need our help. They’re going to be fucking massive. It’s more so us trying to latch on to them before they fucking are playing arenas, they remember us (laughs).
Do you ever long for the anonymity you once had? For a long time, that was part of The Armed, but now it’s gone. Do you ever look back on those times with nostalgia and miss them?
Sure. But I think, like most good things in life, there’s a time when it exists and a time when it doesn’t. And I don’t miss what anonymity was turning into—like, putting the clues together again, right? It was happening, which was weird, and I felt like it was scaring people into focusing more on the personnel. So, I feel like, at this point, I’ll just list the 15 people who played on the album.
Although I miss the anonymity, I have another superpower now: the ability to get older and not care about anything.
I think the things I would have concerned myself with before are different. The reason we initially approached things anonymously is because there’s usually a core group of people who do most of this work. Over time, the collaborative nature shifts as people come and go. We’ve always wanted the flexibility to do what we want. So, we’re very transparent with those we collaborate with—This is basically how it works.
We adopted anonymity because we didn’t want to be discovered. It’s not a solo project, and it’s not a band. It’s something else. And it’s hard for people to understand.
And it’s not that it’s wrong for people to watch it because it’s a different thing. I think what we were trying to avoid at the time was, like, it drives me nuts when you hear it because I do the same thing.
Everyone has opinions about, well, like, this era of this band when this person was involved. But often, those opinions are full of shit. Some people dismiss things because of a different face they see or whatever. So, from the start, our thing was to avoid that.
That was what influenced that decision. Also, the idea that it’s just about The Armed—that’s the only thing that matters. It’s not about this person or that person. It might be none of us, all of us, or some of these people. It doesn’t matter. The reason we end up self-identifying is that it feels silly to talk to someone in Europe for some radio stations, like trying to identify your birth certificate.
You’re like, I feel like I’m doing some goofy, Slipknot-style stuff. This wasn’t meant to be a disguise. It was more about art. And then it reached a point where people became more focused on identity because of the anonymity.
It was as if it had become time for it to go away. And that’s how all of life works. And then something else happens at school. So I get it. And I miss it in some ways.
But in other ways, it’s OK. I mean, the project is so damn convoluted. No one still knows what’s going on. No, I mean, everything I see is always wildly wrong. Let’s acknowledge that we are living in an era of misinformation and disinformation.
You mentioned in previous interviews that your art is an open rebellion against the culture of expectations and heavy music. From your perspective, what’s the biggest frustration with today’s heavy music scene?
It’s very different from what I would say eight years ago when we started with Only Love, like what I would call the Ultrapop deal with all proper pop behavior. If anything, we were pretty accurate and prescient in our assessment of how things were going, anticipating that it would eventually become, despite all the hype.
It’s a tradition-oriented rock ‘n’ roll thing. Back in the day, I was frustrated by the over-the-top religiosity of heavy music, which I thought was as bad or worse. There was also a comical level of shitty dudes spouting off, like, some purebred, puritanical shit—That’s not a new thing.
It was to shine light on what’s happening because a particular person might be approaching it with, like, cool leftist ideals. But that person can still be a total piece of shit.
It was as silly as it sounds, especially in a day when anyone can find anything on the Internet to support these claims. That was frustrating. But that doesn’t exist as much anymore. I believe it has changed incredibly fast. The main frustration is that you’re still seeing stuff like this.
A lot is going on, but I don’t want to be seen as a hater because, honestly, the things I would mention aren’t necessarily bad or anything. An insular mindset is currently prevailing. Everything is becoming about people focusing so much on hyper-maximizing profit for the absolute top of whatever industry that we’re seeing this in all sectors right now.
The job of 10 people now falls on one person, who makes a fraction of what those other 10 would have made 10 years ago. It’s just the way things are. I don’t want to be the guy who throws around the C word—capitalism—but it’s where we are as a culture right now.
I guess what I’m most disappointed in is the “Machine Gun Kellyfication” of everything. For instance, many people are unaware of the differences between Carcass, Machine Gun Kelly, Blink-182, the Dead Kennedys, and Green Day. It’s all lumped into one thing, and that’s not their fault.
Perhaps the honest answer is that I’m no longer upset about such things. I want to focus on my stuff now. Let it be what it is. And everyone can do their own thing, and whatever happens, happens. Currently, there are more pressing concerns than the state of heavy music.
I spent years talking shit about some shit that doesn’t matter at the moment. If there are cracks in the plaster, but the house is on fire, you deal with the flames first.
Is there anything we didn’t discuss that you’d like to bring to our attention?
Actually, there is. There’s a different approach to visualizations—considering every part of it, from the PR to the music videos. Everything is art. It’s all one experience, depending on how people perceive it. The music is always the most important, but everything is part of the whole.
Another significant difference with this one is that we’ve always aimed to attract people with re-watchable, enticing, and mysterious visuals, while also incorporating plenty of visual appeal. The first video, for “Well Made Play,” is intense—two people beating the shit out of you in a dark warehouse. It’s intentionally very uncomfortable to watch, both visually and in terms of content. The sound effects are as loud as the song in the video mix. This is not a video built for you to want to spin back and rewatch it. It’s ugly, but in a meaningful way. It’s cool.
I’m thrilled about the upcoming shows and the opportunity to play these songs live. We’re going to approach it much more viscerally in this setting. I’m looking forward to getting in small rooms with a bunch of sweaty people and messing shit up to these songs. The new material will translate really well to a live setting.
band pic by Luke Nelson
