Album review: The Armed – The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed

Soothsayers as much as showmen, The Armed saw the United States’ current implosion coming. Fans of the Detroit-based experimentalists knew well their fascination with themes of misinformation, manipulation of the press and outright obfuscation of reality. Yet surely only the mercurial minds within truly comprehended quite how those methods would be weaponised at the highest levels of government to steer The Land Of The Free towards authoritarianism, oligarchy and downright fascist erosion of interpersonal empathy.

The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed is a thrillingly unsubtle response. Compared to the relative accessibility of 2021’s Ultrapop and the 2023’s exceptional, indie-inflected Perfect Saviors, these 11 tracks are faster and more furious, glitchier and less easily digestible.

Opener Well Made Play is 133 seconds of feral howling, excoriating guitars and unhinged sax – with Deafheaven’s George Clarke somewhere in the mix. Purity Drag buries its hip-swivelling punk swagger under layers of distortion, while Kingbreaker tumbles into dissonant experimentalism with extra anguish courtesy of Punch vocalist Meghan O’Neil.

Crucially, the mania is rooted in ever-darker, more turbulent real world experience. Politics have always bubbled just beneath the surface with The Armed. For their mind-boggling 2023 K! cover, frontman Tony Wolski sported a white vest with the scribbled-on message: ‘NO ONE OWNS ANYTHING’. On face, he was referring to ideas on the ownership of art. Deeper down, he could have been paraphrasing George Orwell or Karl Marx. In August 2024, harsh reality bit into their fantasy with "financial challenges" a major contributing factor to the cancellation of a North American co-headline run with Ho99o9. On March 8, 2025, they ‘supported’ veteran liberal Bernie Sanders at Eminem’s old high school gym in Michigan.

Tony has underlined that this is the soundtrack for a world on the edge, calling it, “music for a statistically wealthy population that somehow can’t afford food or medicine – endlessly scrolling past vacation photos, gym selfies and images of child amputees in the same feed. It reflects the dissociation required just to exist in that reality.”

True to that, Broken Mirror, I Steal What I Want and Local Millionaire walk the line between madness or mournfulness and invigoration to make change. Even more traditionally melodic nuggets Sharp Teeth and Heathen are unsettlingly off-kilter, ensuring that no-one rests easy in this hour of distress.

Cacophonous closer A More Perfect Design emphatically underlines the urgency and unease, a discomforting warning that the worst is yet to come. Uninterested in taking over the airwaves or lighting up the charts, it is art at its unapologetically visceral peak. More than that, it’s vitriolic fresh proof that absolutely no band is more vital, and that maybe we really would be better burning it all to the ground.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Converge, Rolo Tomassi, Deafheaven

The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed is released on August 1 via Sargent House