The Best Albums of 2025
Anxious Sound
2025 / 10
Twilight Override
Jeff Tweedy
2025 / 9
The Spiritual Sound
Agriculture
2025 / 8
Ill At Ease
Preoccupations
2025 / 7
Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Vol. 18
Bob Dylan
139-Song Collection released October 31 on Columbia and Legacy
Favorite track: "Moonshiner (The Times They Are A-Changin' Alternate Take, NYC, 1963)"
bobdylan.lnk.to
Favorite track: "Moonshiner (The Times They Are A-Changin' Alternate Take, NYC, 1963)"
bobdylan.lnk.to
2025 / 6
Lonely People With Power
Deafheaven
2025 / 5
One Battle After Another OST
Jonny Greenwood
2025 / 4
Never Enough
Turnstile
2025 / 3
The Trials and Tribulations Of...
Clikatat Ikatowi
2025 / 2
Observance
Primitive Man
2025 / 1
The Future is Here and Everything Needs to be Destroyed
The Armed
Bankrupt moralism. Cultish partisanism. Mindless consumption of unreality. The Armed see a troubling trajectory, and on THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED, their discontent is deafening. The band's sixth album is a warning and condemnation, delivered with feverish intensity across 11 tracks of blistering, frenetic noise-rock. Think “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall" with a vitriolic urgency amplified to eleven, because the rain is falling NOW. The flood is on.
The fractured synths, distorted guitars, and furious vocals on album opener “Well Made Play” signal the emergency from the outset, frantically turning order into chaos and moral clarity into indictment. Every moment pulses with disappointment and disdain. From there, the album combusts as it careens. It’s more demolition than careful construction. Blast beats detonate without warning. Dissonance looms like a constant smog cloud. All melody is contaminated — beautiful but bruised. When the band teases pop sensibilities, such as on “Sharp Teeth” and “I Steal What I Want,” it promptly and unmercifully stomps them out with torrents of feedback and rage.
The fractured synths, distorted guitars, and furious vocals on album opener “Well Made Play” signal the emergency from the outset, frantically turning order into chaos and moral clarity into indictment. Every moment pulses with disappointment and disdain. From there, the album combusts as it careens. It’s more demolition than careful construction. Blast beats detonate without warning. Dissonance looms like a constant smog cloud. All melody is contaminated — beautiful but bruised. When the band teases pop sensibilities, such as on “Sharp Teeth” and “I Steal What I Want,” it promptly and unmercifully stomps them out with torrents of feedback and rage.
The promotional material for the album’s release heralded it as “an unfiltered expression of Weltschmerz, the German term describing the anguish of the world’s reality versus our idealized visions of what it should be.” Whether confronting societal numbness (“Broken Mirror” skewers hypocrisy and performative patriotism, through snarling vocals by Moe Kazra of Prostitute) or personal desperation, The Armed don’t just want you to listen. They demand you confront the dispiriting reality head-on.
On THE FUTURE IS HERE…, hope is undermined, and beauty is continuously betrayed by brutality. Urgent defiance is all that remains. “Don’t let it make you go numb / Don’t let it dull your compassion,” Tony Wolski pleads on the closing track, “A More Perfect Design.” In an era where mass despair is casually and sleepily consumed like your daily latte, that defiance — unfiltered, ragged, and uncompromising — is its own kind of salvation and a desperate plea to wake up. Here, The Armed remind us that, now especially, there is no more critical act and no time to wait.
On THE FUTURE IS HERE…, hope is undermined, and beauty is continuously betrayed by brutality. Urgent defiance is all that remains. “Don’t let it make you go numb / Don’t let it dull your compassion,” Tony Wolski pleads on the closing track, “A More Perfect Design.” In an era where mass despair is casually and sleepily consumed like your daily latte, that defiance — unfiltered, ragged, and uncompromising — is its own kind of salvation and a desperate plea to wake up. Here, The Armed remind us that, now especially, there is no more critical act and no time to wait.
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Can't you see I'm on the edge?
The Armed, “Sharp Teeth”