ULTRAPOP

The Armed

The Armed is quite the enigma. A collective of mostly unknown musicians and collaborators based in Detroit that are doing neat and unique things in the world of punk and hardcore. The only recognizable name that I've heard associated with the band is Kurt Ballou of Converge fame, who serves as the band's executive producer. To me, that is quite interesting since you don't typically associate that role with a heavy rock record. I love Ballou's production on numerous records he's worked on so I'm curious just how involved he was in this process. Was he hands on during the writing and recording process? Were there so many different producers and collaborators working on this record that Ballou's role was really just to coordinate and tie everything together? These are the questions that I wonder. You can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole with band conspiracies too. For example, how do they get all the funding for the cinematic music videos and guerilla style billboards in Times Square or on the faces of LA hotels? Are they being financed by Tony Hawk (this is apparently a real conspiracy theory)? I'm getting off track but this is all just to say that even before getting into the music, The Armed have already cultivated a serious buzz thanks to their mysterious origins and marketing savvy.

So what does ULTRAPOP sound like? Well, it's overblown, distorted, and absolutely crushing. Your first time hearing this will be challenging with just how extreme the volume and the noise can be. That doesn't sound very pop, does it? We've got throat shredding screams, mathcore passages, pounding hyperactive drums; this all doesn't seem to be living up to the promise given in the title. While I don't have an idea of what ultra-pop is, hyperpop is certainly a genre I've become familiar with and this album does share parallels. The overblown bass and drums, the abrasive presentation, glitchy use of electronics and edits, heavy vocal manipulations, and cutesy melodies all pop up at times during this record. I really can't think of anything more hyperpop than on the insane euphoric blasts on A Life So Wonderful, which feel like the most grand opera sped up to impossible speeds to get that digital squishing effect. Place an absolutely crushing blast beat underneath it, get everyone in the room to scream until they no longer have a voice, and you have one of the most enthralling, groundbreaking pop moments on the entire record.

While it doesn't have a moment as groundbreaking as what I just described, the track Masunaga Vapors to me felt even more special as a whole. It is a devastating mathcore track with some frantic drums parts and some pretty great screamo styled vocals. This track reminds me a lot of the first track off the last Liturgy record I listened to, except the guitar leads here are perfect. It makes me feel like I'm ascending to a higher place, away from all the chaos in the song, and frankly from the new norm of every day life. There is one track, however, where the band leans all the way into oppressively heavy territory without any sort of saving grace, and that's Big Shell. It is blaringly loud. Droning walls of distorted guitar from end to end. However, the key element that makes this song for me is the fierce vocal performance from an unknown female. Her performance was probably aggressive enough, but they saw fit to add a little distortion and delay to it just to make it sound a little more inescapable. Looking back over what I've covered this year, I can safely say this is the heaviest thing I've heard in 2021.

There are many more wonderfully blood-pumping moments on this record, but I ultimately didn't end up completely falling in love with it. There are a few tracks where I felt like the band sat on the fence, unsure of whether to go in a heavier direction or a poppier one, which was a bit of a disappointment considering the band have shown that they can do both. It's not really a decision. An example of this is one of the album's singles, All Futures, which to me was just a mediocre noise rock track. The only other complaint that I had was that some of the sung vocals on a few tracks felt a little uninspired; dampening some of the great things the band was trying to do. Other than that, however, this was a pretty good record. It is a very challenging record, but if you like extreme, loud, rock music, this could be up your alley, provided you can acclimatize to the sheer volume.