Seeing The Armed at The Roxy on September 20, 2025 was not just a whim- for me it was a necessity. Whenever the Armed play in Los Angeles, I make it a point to attend. Their concerts feel like rare glimpses into a future world. With their latest tour stop supported by Prostitute, another heavy and unpredictable band, I wanted to break down not only the performance but also why The Armed matter so deeply and why their most recent album, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED, truly rules.
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The Armed have become my favorite modern band. I am not sure how it happened; I can’t always control what I gravitate toward. Perhaps they filled the vacuum left by The Dillinger Escape Plan, a band whose live shows once stood as the gold standard for ferocity and unpredictability. Perhaps they were the only group writing anthems with lyrics powerful enough to resonate like “Sport of Form” off Perfect Saviors, my favorite album of 2023. That track, which ends with a peaking sing-along verse of “Doesn’t Anyone Even Know You? Does Anyone Even Care?” feels like a poignant reverie for the social media age. The theme of spiritual decay in the social media age continues to surface in their music, although lately it has taken a much darker turn.
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Coined by their own tongue-in-cheek slogan as “Earth’s Greatest Band,” The Armed are rewriting the rulebook on how to package music and how to make pointed cultural criticism. They are an outlier for so many reasons. Their output is an exercise in avant-garde performance, high-concept creation, and constant self-reinvention. In fact, regardless of the slogan, they do not consider themselves a band in the traditional sense. They describe themselves more accurately as a collective, which has major implications for how they work, how they tour, and how they present their art.
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In the same vein as German krautrock legends Can, The Armed rotate their members to avoid any rigid notion of hierarchy. The only constant so far has been Tony Wolski, a former advertising creative director turned hardcore ringmaster. His background explains a lot about how The Armed operate. That experience in the advertising world informs how they manage their media presence. They understand how to present themselves uniquely, how to stand out from the noise of the music world, and how to produce images and campaigns that disrupt your scroll. Scrolling is not just a marketing challenge for them; it is one of the very phenomena they critique in their songs. The process of endlessly flicking through a feed is one of the band’s major gripes with contemporary life, and they hold a mirror to it so we can see how ugly we’re becoming.
Their most recent album, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED, functions as a requiem for the social media age. It captures a moment in which human beings are being numbed and dehumanized by the violence and absurdity they see interspersed with casual content every day on their phones. This constant exposure has nullified social media’s loftier purposes and stripped it of genuine connection. The album also arrives at an especially timely moment as the AI age begins to encroach on the social media age, threatening to push one technological revolution out to make room for another. When that day fully arrives and new, ugly discourses arise from integrating unnatural tech into our lives, I am sure The Armed will be there again to break down how badly it is making the human mind and spirit malfunction.
These themes are not just vague impressions. They are showcased directly on the album’s tracklist. One of the most memorable songs, “Purity Drag,” captures how we constantly subject one another to purity tests while thinking of ourselves as the most virtuous. The lyrics are biting and ironic:
“My goodness pure, my conscience free
I’m a gift unto your world
Though you’re, oh, so blind to see
You live in a world my hands bestow
And despite your pettiness
I’ve no cracks to dull my glow
Purest of them all, nothing is my fault
I am divine (your privilege, my presence)”
These lines dramatize the virtue-signaling that social media encourages. Compelled to constantly voice our opinions, only statements filtered to ensure total ideological purity can be broadcast without backlash. If you are a leftist and you hold the party line except for one minor deviation, you can be ostracized with nearly as much harshness as someone at the opposite end of the spectrum. The same phenomenon exists on the right. Both extremes have become distorted mirror images of one another, obsessed with testing loyalty rather than cultivating empathy.
For me, the next major standout on the album is its closer, “A More Perfect Design.” Its lyrics are ferocious in their truth and leave the listener speechless:
“I’m putting blinders on, and I can’t stand to see
The dissonance is turning sadness to fatigue
Vacation, workout tip, then child amputee
The end of feeling human
Don’t let it make you go numb
Don’t let it dull your compassion
Don’t let them tell you you’re wrong
Don’t let them claim this is balance, no”
One can only read these lyrics as a response to the war in Gaza. It comes across as a plea for basic humanity, a nonpartisan reaction to the violence we see every day. It is a message that resonates across the spectrum, even with people who might otherwise disagree on everything else. Pleas to our shared humanity are far more effective at creating change than finger-pointing, purity tests, and public shaming.
Earlier in the song, they sing:
“There are some wars
So inhuman that they damn
Generations”
That lyric raises a chilling question. What effect will the constant exposure to the brutality of war have on us as the years go by? As we become numb to death and destruction, will it all just become another part of our daily status quo, as ever-present as sales tax? Most likely yes, and then what?
With all these thoughts and themes hanging over my head, I always turn to music for solutions to life’s complexity, even when that complexity is nothing more than simple brutality. Experiencing The Armed live is like a head-on collision with your own mortality. The pits are violent, the music is crushing, and yet onstage the band erupts with joy and inventiveness. They manage to find fresh ways to be original and avant-garde purely through live performance.
The opening band, Prostitute, added a crucial dimension to the night. They are another post-hardcore outfit and appear on The Armed’s new album with the track “Broken Mirror.” Hailing from Dearborn, Michigan—a stone’s throw from The Armed’s hometown of Detroit—Prostitute’s music blends rage, sensuality, and an almost mystical poetry in motion vibe that allows their violence to play out with uncanny grace and precision.
When the curtain finally lifted at The Roxy, Los Angeles was introduced to a brand new iteration of The Armed. The band opened with a wild wrecking ball of hardcore by launching into “ALL FUTURES,” one of the standouts from their brilliant 2021 album ULTRAPOP. It was a hostile and thrilling introduction, followed by another classic to prime the audience for new material, “Night City Aliens,” a track the band created for the video game Cyberpunk 2077.
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From there the band dove into the full scope of new material, including the brutality clinic of “Kingbreaker” and the anthemic satire of “Local Millionaire.” Each song came off heavier and more visceral live than it does on record. Another moment that made every fan’s heart skip a beat was their Nine Inch Nails cover of “Somewhat Damaged.” This unexpected detour lent the evening a beautiful perversity that only Trent Reznor’s genius could inspire but that only The Armed would dare reinterpret with such dynamic ferocity. Finally, the band closed with “Forever Scum,” a swansong that has become a signature closer from their earlier catalogue. It is a track that leaves venues in dazed ruins, a perfect encapsulation of the unhinged intensity that The Armed inspire in their fans.
These were my main takeaways from the show. I loved nearly every minute of it. A few friends I had persuaded to attend are now slowly inching onto The Armed’s bandwagon, which feels like a small victory. I truly believe The Armed can one day become icons of American rock and roll. Their ascent may take longer than it would for other bands that fit more comfortably into existing niches, but their originality will pay off in the long run.
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Part of the reason for their slower rise is that, as hardcore, metallic, or alternative as The Armed can be, they do not fully belong to any one scene. Their music draws from many styles but resists being boxed in. That makes them attractive to leaders and tastemakers who recognize great music when they hear it, but it discourages followers in the short term—people who need to see their peers embracing a band before they feel comfortable doing so themselves. Without a scene to rally around them, there is no built-in army of fans following a marching order to push them to the top. Still, I am confident their creativity will overcome these hurdles. Eventually the world will understand that The Armed are indeed this planet’s greatest band.
Words by Rob Shepyer
Photos by Raymond Camacho
