Watching the trajectory of The Armed has been at least a bit eyebrow raising. Not only having each album require a different set of genre tags, but also having such a confusing media presence and an anonymous lineup with a long list of known collaborators that makes them feel very far away from being a conventional band and closer to an art project of sorts. The media presence is not what I'm most concerned with, because even with all the convoluted contributing, there still is some semblance of continuity between records, and you can still trace that from The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed all the way to These Are Lights.
I first found out about The Armed though Untitled, already a weird name for an album, though at that time there was still somewhat of a conventionality to the band's sound. The band's earlier metalcore sound got dragged through mathcore and noise rock, but was still recognizably a hardcore record. While some seeds for it were planted on Only Love, it was Ultrapop that really made The Armed's sound such a clusterfuck to wrap your head around, pushing the sound even further into both noise, and, as the title suggests, pop. Weird as the latter genre push was, it was such a strong element of the follow-up, Perfect Saviors, that I had to cover it in the non-metal series.
The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed takes The Armed back to being heavy enough for a main page feature, walking back on the turn-of-the-century indie rock of its predecessor, but that doesn't mean that the album is any less stylistically confusing or so unquestionably metal/hardcore for me to confidently assert their place here the way their early work would. Stylistically, it is most similar to Ultrapop, an overwhelming noisy but nonetheless melodic affair, one that somehow feels even more overwhelming than that respective album.
A lot of what makes The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed is the contrast in the elements that the album throws at the listener. It's maximalism is to be somewhat expected, so there's some getting accustomed to having a lot of sounds being thrown at you, but once parsed the elements turn out to be a lot of fun. Free jazz-ish saxophone on a lot of tracks, with the most immediate impact on the opener, the insanely catchy pop chorus of "Purity Drag" being sung and screamed simultaneously, the bass grooves on "Kingbreaker" and "Local Millionaire", the bits of drone leading into sludgy hardcore on "Broken Mirror" featuring Prostitute, the almost sugary etherealness of longest track "Heathen".
It's very rare to find so much melody in something so inaccessible, and it's like the album rewards you for being able to live with how noisy and overwhelming it is. I'm sure that's just how a lot of things in life are like.
