Alphabetical Order: The Armed - 'Only Love'

A chaotic hardcore record that found me at exactly the right time.

Welcome to ZERO CRED, the only music newsletter ever to exist. Alphabetical Order is a project where I go through my record collection and try to make sense of my life, from A to Z.

Please note: All sales from my store this week will be donated to help wildfire relief here in Los Angeles. This includes ALL FUTURES, DESTRUCTION: Five Years of the Armed (2018-2023).

An empty beer can hit me on the side of the head and I was reborn. I don’t remember anything before the can, but I remember everything that happened after, like it shook me awake or something.

The can had come flying out of a big orange fog on stage. Every once in a while something would pop out of the fog. Sometimes it was a limb or a fist or the neck of a guitar. Other times, a can.

Then an entire man came bursting out of the fog. He was a large man. Taller than everyone in the room. And he was wearing a ghillie suit which is the camouflage get-up you wear to disguise yourself in the bushes when you’re doing army stuff. He was carrying a folding table above his head.

After the man in a ghillie suit, it was a small blonde woman that came out of the fog. She was holding a cell phone with a selfie ring light on it. Everyone was aggressively stomping around and screaming but the two of them calmly planted the table and two stools in the middle of the mayhem and started drinking wine and taking selfies. This was a commentary, I thought. On what, I wasn’t smart enough to know. But this meant something.

The two of them looked right at me and into my soul. I was no longer a spectator. I was part of this now too, whatever it was. It hit me that I should capture this moment, whatever it was. Maybe this will be important some day and I will understand it better, I thought. I took out my camera and snapped a photo. Click. A strobe light flashed in the background. I took another. Click.

This is the first memory I have of The Armed. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was about to collect a lot more memories over the next few years. Memories from different cities and weird places. Memories of chaos and joy. But this was the first one. 2018. Right after the release of their album Only Love. Standing in the middle of Saint Vitus in Brooklyn, watching mayhem unfold around me and trying to make sense of any of it but mostly just enjoying the spectacle. An unrelenting onslaught that was intimidating, cathartic, confusing, thrilling, and other words, and other words, and other words.

If you go to hardcore shows for long enough, you start to feel like you’ve seen it all after a while. I’d been following hardcore for 20 years at that point and was feeling pretty jaded about it. Same bands. Same riffs. Same rants about blah blah blah between songs. Gradually, your place at shows shifts too, from the impressionable teenager standing as close to the stage as physically possible, to the guy slumping against the back wall with his arms folded.

I was standing somewhere in the middle of the venue that night when the can hit me in the head and my brain rebooted. I suddenly realized there was more excitement to be found and I rushed up front to witness it with my own eyes. I wanted to see more.

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It has taken me seven years to learn everything I know about The Armed but I will try to condense it all down to one paragraph.

The Armed is an amorphous collective of dozens of musicians, artists, and collaborators that has been active for the last 15 or so years. Some of them are members of other notable bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Converge. Some are accomplished jazz musicians. And some of them are just talented local freaks they know in their home base of Detroit. For a long time, they were deliberately obtuse about who they were and what they did, using fake names and fabricating elaborate backstories. But they’ve been moving away from that over the last year and presenting as their true selves, which is sometimes more confusing than the tales they’ve made up. Oh yes and one time they spent a year getting absolutely jacked for no real reason at all.

That’s the Cliffs Notes version, but there’s so much more to it if you want to chase the rabbit down the hole. They’ve hidden directions to secret EPs on the insides of their record sleeves. They filmed a movie in a Masonic temple that I genuinely thought was going to end in human sacrifice. They are headed by a single leader who is actually not the guy who they promote as their leader but a different guy who works at a supermarket.

It’s all very convoluted but it’s also incredibly rewarding for the small cult of dedicated followers that eagerly awaits and dissects their official decrees, and I definitely consider myself one of them.

Over the last few years I’ve gotten to know the band better. I’ve written cover stories about their operation, visited their secret headquarters, and lifted weights with them at Gold’s Gym in Venice. I collected so many photos documenting all these moments I made a zine about it.

In a way, the proximity has demystified The Armed for me, but in another way, it’s reinforced my dedication to it. Knowing that this is not some sort of elaborate prank but a group of people who go through extreme lengths for their art just makes me want to dig in even deeper.

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I probably would have hated a band like The Armed when I was young. Being new to punk and hardcore, I remember being a teenage purist. Anything that strayed too far from the aggressive roots of the genre rubbed me the wrong way. I found it too pretentious, too polished, too soft. I liked hardcore the way it was Supposed To Sound and I didn’t appreciate bands that experimented with the formula. God forbid it was a band I liked that was trying to branch out from their already established identity. I hated that the most.

I see that happening now with The Armed. Anytime I publicly praise them, I will hear from the nonbelievers, especially younger ones, with the same criticisms. Even close friends will complain to me that they “don’t get it.” There is a density to the Armed that frustrates people, which is probably what I like about it.

Hardcore is arguably more popular now than it’s ever been, but The Armed doesn’t fit neatly into this trend. Sure, there are plenty of straightforward rippers in their arsenal, especially in the earlier material. I think a song like “Forever Scum” or “Cop Friends” goes as hard as anything out there. But they’ve pushed their sound so hard over the last few years and ended up so far from where they started, landing in some liminal place between pop and hardcore. It’s a real Ship of Theseus situation. I’d argue that there’s nothing really like it happening in music right now.

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But I don’t want to waste any more time taking guesses as to why some people might not like The Armed because that’s not my problem. I only mention it to say that I’m glad I found the band at the right time in my life. A few years earlier I might not have been ready for it. A few years later I might’ve already given up on hardcore entirely.

A real pathetic thing happens to music fans when they hit their thirties. Music starts to take a backseat to all the adult crap that consumes your life. Your brain dries up and you stop letting new ideas in. The albums you listened to in high school become warm blankets and you just want to stay in bed forever until you die.

They want us to feel this way. I don’t know who They is but it’s somebody, and They profit off our nostalgia. They promote DJ nights dedicated to recreating the scenes from our youth. They organize festivals where They force our favorite bands to play their popular album from 20 years ago. They don’t want us to grow. They don’t want us to change.

Only Love was a shock to my system I didn’t know I needed. It got me out of a stagnation I didn’t even realize I was in. Listening to the same albums and thinking the same thoughts. Every few years we have to find these things that break us free and remind us who we are and who we can be. We have to do it or we die. Because if there’s anything I know about living on this earth it is this…

We must grow. We must grow. WE MUST GROW.

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Anyway, back to the can. Not the one that hit me in the head, but the one I’m drinking out of right now. I’m taking sips of seltzer while I watch The Armed record their new album in a Los Angeles studio. I have been sworn to secrecy about the details but how could I spoil it even if I wanted to? How can chaos possibly be spoiled? How could someone spoil a lightning storm?

All I can say is that everything is being dumped into the mix. Violins and pianos and the loudest guitar feedback I’ve ever heard in my life. They spent the entire afternoon today trying to get the most obnoxious guitar sound to lead into a song. One of the takes was low and rumbly and it sounded like NNMMMMMRRRR. Another take was high and screechy and it sounded like EEEEIIIWWWAAKKK. This went on for several hours until they decided they had what they needed, that they had recorded the most obnoxious sound.

No photo can capture how terrifyingly loud it is in this room but still I pull out my camera and point it at the floor full of guitars and pedals and microphones. Maybe one day this noise will mean something. To me or to you or to anyone who needs it. Click.

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