“Speaking for myself, this record might be a snapshot of me deciding whether I’m going to live out the rest of my life as Eckhart Tolle or live out the rest of my life as Ted Kaczynski,” laughs PROPAGANDHI guitarist and vocalist Chris Hannah. In true PROPAGANDHI fashion, the Manitoba, Canada based outfit’s eighth album, At Peace is smart music for dangerous times. “Everything I’m singing about is still coming from being the same person that wrote and sang our first record How to Clean Everything in 1993,” Hannah states recalling the band’s snarky skate-thrash origins. “But what we’re putting into the songs now, probably reflects more despair than 30 years ago when we had similar perspectives, but with strands of hope and naivete. Now it’s the existential dread of eking out a life worth living in this completely failed society.” At Peace was written and recorded as political storm clouds were beginning to darken in the months before Emperor Trump’s ascent to power. It’s an album of poetic and polemic songs written shortly before the American oligarch’s suggestion that PROPAGANDHI’s home country become the U.S.’s 51st State. Songs like the album’s apocryphal “Fire Season” presages the climate-change-driven wildfires that wiped out portions of Southern California. At its core, At Peace is an album of inconvenient and unavoidable truths that hit with all the subtlety of an Orwellian boot stamping on a human face forever.
It took us a while to get to Big Smile, Greer’s long-awaited debut album. After four years and two EPs, the foursome behind Greer was feeling burnt and disconnected from the songs they’d written and toured. They went their separate ways for more than a year, retreating to their Southern California homes to decompress. When they reconvened in 2023, they went back to where it all started: drummer Lucas Ovalle’s garage. It was in this familiar environment that Ovalle, guitarist lead singer Josiah, guitarist Corbin Jacques, and bassist Seth Thomson learned how to be friends again and shared all the anxieties and revelations they’d endured on hiatus through crafting songs.