Experimental collective the Armed are back, and they’ve brought Deafheaven vocalist George Clarke with them — at least for their new music video. To promote their newly-announced next album, The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, the celebrated hardcore deconstructionists have teamed up with the blackgaze trailblazer to promote the album’s “Well Made Play.”
A confrontational music video from director Christopher Gruse was delivered behind the track today (May 21st). In it, two men shackled together in some far-off warehouse beat the living hell out of each other. To the right of them, we see a bunch of figures in hazmat suits loading a jetski onto a truck. To the left of them, if you squint hard enough, you see the Armed hammering into a melancholic crush of feral screams, downward-tumbling bass distortion and prismatic saxophone soloing. Clarke isn’t singing on the track, but he is, according to press materials, in the video somewhere.
Of the futile fighting taking place in the video, Armed vocalist Tony Wolski explains: “While we chase distractions and small comforts, we’re pushed into endless competition with each other — often while those with real power take freely, right in front of us.”
The Armed’s next album is further described in a press release as “a grim reflection of a society that mistakes narcissism for self-awareness.” The record is reportedly “genre-defying, yet overtly pissed,” and apparently reflects the broader anguish of the world as we know it.
“It’s 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,” Wolski added.
While Clarke may not actually be on The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, the album does feature musical contributions from Converge’s Kurt Ballou, Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen, Ken Szymanski, Patrick Shiroishi, Urian Hackney, Meghan O’Neil, Cara Drolshagen, Tony Wolski, Brian Wolski, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), Prostitute, Zach Weeks, Mark Guiliana, Kayleigh Goldsworthy and Derek Coburn.
The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed is due out August 1st via Sargent House.
The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed tracklisting:
Well Made Play
Purity Drag
Kingbreaker
Grace Obscure
Broken Mirror
Sharp Teeth
I Steal What I Want
Local Millionaire
Gave up
Heathen
A More Perfect Design
The Armed tour dates 2025:
8/14 Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair ^
8/15 New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge ^
8/16 Washington DC – The Atlantis ^
9/16 Seattle, WA – SUBSTATION ^
9/17 Portland – Mississippi Studios ^
9/19 San Francisco – Rickshaw Stop ^
9/20 Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy Theatre ^
12/12 Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall ^
12/13 Detroit, El Club ^
^ with Prostitute