Is The Armed's mind-blowing new album The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed the most prescient noise of 2025? Quite possibly. Still one of the strangest-operating bands on Earth, the mysterious collective are also becoming a sane voice in a confused, broken world. Singer Tony Wolski explains all...
On March 8, The Armed had a supporting slot at a high school in Warren, Michigan. But the person they were opening up for wasn’t a typical headliner – topping the bill was U.S. Senator and two-time Democratic Presidential nominee Bernie Sanders, who was there on his Fight Oligarchy tour.
The band were meant to be in LA shooting the video for Well Made Play, the opening track from their sixth full-length, The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed, released last week. This, though, was an opportunity they couldn’t refuse.
The new record is political with a capital P. It addresses and was inspired by pretty much everything Bernie is talking about on this tour, which is essentially everything he’s been preaching for decades now: the severely damaging effects of wealth disparity, and how it threatens democracy and ultimately leads to fascism.
“We made this record that had this pretty specific tilt,” says vocalist Tony Wolski. “It’s basically talking about class politics, as well as depression at seeing what progressive-leaning momentum actually went into – which was the fucking gutter. Instead of having any actual impact, it just became, 'What if socialism was a TikTok trend?' It was just complete nonsense for the most part. So when we got offered out of nowhere to play this Bernie thing, it seemed like the universe telling us to do this.”
And they did. Or the members who weren’t in LA did, anyway, ripping an eight-song set in front of an audience whose average age, Tony estimates, “was probably, like, 60.” That’s a slight exaggeration, but it certainly wasn’t their usual crowd. Still, The Armed started with a cover of Iggy And The Stooges’ Search And Destroy, then played seven of their own songs, and were told they essentially had free rein while onstage.
“It was really authentic,” says Tony. “That's not a risk most people are willing to take. They told us it was essentially our platform for the half-hour, and to do and say whatever we wanted. As someone who's lost faith in almost all politicians, what Bernie says – even though he's not 100 per cent on – still rings the most true. And I do think that there's an alternate universe in which he wasn't... umm…”
In which he wasn’t screwed over twice by the Democratic establishment?
“Exactly,” he smiles. “I think there's maybe an alternate reality where things in the world would be different. America being what it is, it sets the stage whether it wants to or not, and whether that's fair or not. So it just seemed like the right thing to do and I'm glad we did it.”
Almost five months later, The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed is here, and its title still rings true. Things are pretty brutal and extreme all around the world right now, with corruption, capitalism and corporate greed running wild against a dual backdrop of outrage and apathy everywhere you look.
And while the title offers a perspective that Tony undoubtedly agrees with, its nihilistic sentiment actually derives from the most unlikely of places.
“The title was stolen from a technology recycling company at a trade show,” Tony confesses. “They had this background with pictures of hard drives, and it said 'The future is here and everything needs to be destroyed' – and they were a company that would take old hard drives and recycle them. It was so comically dramatic, but they weren't trying to be dramatic. It's just this ridiculous piece of ad copy. So in true The Armed form, it seemed really appropriate that it was both oddly poignant to the time, but also sort of a joke.”
That’s the paradox at the heart of The Armed. This is, after all, a band who for a long time didn’t disclose any of its members until 2023’s fifth record Perfect Saviors, whose members assumed other identities – for a long while, for example, Tony went by Adam Vallely – and who propped up a ‘fake’ figurehead called Dan Greene, who wasn’t the same Dan Greene that actually does exist and writes music in band.
Now, it feels like they’re being more straightforward and honest. Unless it’s a very clever double- or triple-bluff, Tony Wolski does, indeed appear to be Tony Wolski, and the rest of the band are no longer obscuring the truth about their real identities. For the most part, anyway. In order for The Armed to perform at the Bernie Sanders rally, they enlisted stand-ins for the video shoot, including Deafheaven vocalist George Clarke (who isn’t even on the record) and Justin Meldell Johnson, who produced it. It’s why the official promo shots for this album don’t actually feature Tony at all.
“Those guys took care of that, and did the promo photos and shit,” says the singer. “And then half the band played the Bernie set.”
Ultimately, it’s all playful distraction. A dismantling of the stereotypical media and promotional commitments most bands have to endure these days, it also adds some rare mystery in a time when everything is searchable and verifiable online.
At the same time, there’s a parallel to be drawn with the ‘post-truth’ era of the MAGA regime. And that’s where that contradiction really comes alive. Because who The Armed are doesn’t really matter anymore, if it ever did. While they enjoyed the self-mythologising that being anonymous afforded them, when that became the focus it was time to take a step back and readjust.
“We’ve always liked to, insofar as we are capable, provide well-thought-out multi-layered art,” says Tony. “But we're not afraid to throw a couple of winks that could go either way in there. Prior to Perfect Saviors, we never credited anyone on any records. So it's been fun to see the revisionist history. And the cloudiness we've left in our wake makes more cloudiness going forward. The reason we started crediting people was because it was being turned into this thing – it was supposed to take the importance off our identity and put focus on the music, but then it just became this conspiracy theories-adjacent thing.”
That was interesting, Tony says, because it was similar to what was happening – and still is – in the world, but it then became a hyper-fixation for people that had the opposite effect the band had intended.
And so, in 2025, The Armed are reaffirming with this new record that it’s the music that’s the important thing – and always has been. With The Future Is Here…, they’ve crafted a brutally powerful rebuttal to the way things are and why. It’s a devastating critique of neoliberalism and capitalism that really examines how those two things have led us to where we are today, especially in America. Unfortunately, Tony doesn’t know how to fix it. Beyond, that is, tearing everything down and starting again.
“I think that when the only viable solution is needing to dismantle the entire system....” He tails off, clearly aware of what he’s advocating for, but perhaps hesitant to actually say it out loud. “And it’s not that that’s the dream scenario, but it's also maybe the only way it could work. But this album is just expressive of the struggle. We're not looking to be the forebearer of anything. It's reflective of our feelings at the moment, but we're not trying to reinvent this band as Rage Against the Machine. We're not equipped to do that. We’re not smart enough to know what to do, but just dumb enough to yell about it.”
In that case, perhaps they should let Bernie Sanders join the band. Then they’d be unstoppable.
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