Jeff Rosenstock makes increasingly chaotic albums for an increasingly chaotic world. With each passing year, it feels like the temperature of the universe boils five degrees hotter, and with each new album, Rosenstock’s music grows more unwieldy and lawless. Louder, faster, more feral. Which brings us to 2023—a planet on fire, a mere 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock, and the release of Rosenstock’s appropriately titled, anarchic record, HELLMODE. “To me, the album feels like the chaos of being alive right now,” Rosenstock says of HELLMODE.

“We’re experiencing all these things at the same time that trigger our senses, and emotions that make us feel terrible. We’re just feeling way too much all at once!” But for all its textured turmoil, there are also surprising glimpses of clarity and grace to be found in HELLMODE, when Rosenstock deliberately slows things down in places that are prettier and more delicate, rare moments of shelter in the storm. Which only makes it more rewarding when these moments unexpectedly unravel and spiral back into extreme, manic chaos, like abruptly being flung into a Nintendo game on level 99.

HELLMODE marks the fifth studio album the prolific Rosenstock has released in the last ten years under his own name, following the dissolution of his beloved cult projects Bomb the Music Industry! and The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. Also tucked into his rapidly expanding catalog is a live record, a ska reimagining of his 2020 album NO DREAM, and various dumps of stray songs and loose singles. And somewhere on the side, he has found time to score the Emmy-nominated animated series Craig of the Creek.

Rosenstock’s rising profile and critical acclaim over the last decade have been something of an anomaly. He’s a proud torchbearer of the punk sonics, aesthetics, and ethos of his youth, leaning into pop punk and ska sensibilities that were deemed Decidedly Uncool by the gatekeepers of the time. (On any given day at a big outdoor music festival, he is likely the only musician who will bust out a saxophone solo.) But when Rosenstock celebrates these styles, he somehow ends up getting praise from tastemakers and landing on prominent year-end lists. Maybe it’s because his appreciation doesn’t feel like cheap nostalgia or surface-level cosplay. Everything he does is just so damned sincere.

That success is something Rosenstock has been conflicted about, and fuels some of the anxiety that runs through HELLMODE. “It’s weird feeling success at the worst possible time, while the world falls apart,” he says. “These things I’ve been unintentionally working towards for the last two decades have come to fruition now, when everything is on fire.”

To record HELLMODE in the summer of 2022, Rosenstock once again enlisted his longtime studio collaborator, Jack Shirley, the Grammy-nominated master of heaviness who has recorded all of Rosenstock’s studio albums. But this time, they took a slightly more ambitious approach, booking time at the legendary EastWest Studios in Hollywood. They recorded to tape in Studio 2, the same hallowed ground where System of a Down recorded Toxicity, and where Whitney Houston laid down vocal tracks for The Bodyguard soundtrack. The newfound studio resources produced the biggest and most expansive Jeff Rosenstock record to date.

If you gave Soul Glo a snapshot of what was in store for them in 2020 at the end of their first practice in 2014, you might put the space time continuum in flux. If you were to tell vocalist Pierce Jordan and guitarist Ruben Polo that everything that they had spent their first month as a band joking about, playing shows with artists from punk vets Paint It Black to Kurt Cobain’s favorites Flipper; from Memphis underground legend Tommy Wright III to platinum producer Pi’erre Bourne, were to actually happen, they might ask you if your hands were as fast as your jokes were. Despite the constant barrage of setbacks, from member changes, to financial strife, to run-ins with the law, Soul Glo has both repeatedly defied the kinds of odds that would fold lesser bands, not to mention their own standards for what they believed they could endure. Simultaneously, stopping or slowing down has never exactly been on the table for them, either.

“When we were stranded in Missouri, we started to weigh out the pros and cons of relocating there. We weren’t just about to leave our mans,” Jordan says. “Songs started getting crafted out there that we still have in the chamber.”

That said, their next release, Songs To Yeet At The Sun, serves as a perfect respite from the silence in between LP’s and the current lull in live performances that the band has become known for nationwide. The five song blessing gives a further insight into the frankly deranged production of bassist/producer Gianmarco Guerra, who served as the sole producer and one of three engineers for the record. Songs like “(Quietly) Do The Right Thing” and “29” continue to show Soul Glo’s affinity for speed as a vehicle for their aggression and messages, while songs like “I’m On Probation” and the previously released “Mathed Up” shows the bands love of chaotic-yet-atmospheric noise and the most popular rhythmic vocal styles of today’s current rap on top of the pummelling heaviness of the drums of TJ Stevenson. The band continues to showcase the rhythmic synergy existing between the entirety of the ensemble throughout the record, while the song “2K” features the straightforward rap production that peeked through on crowd-favorite songs “31” and “32” on the bands previous record The Nigga In Me Is Me, and also features a verse with instantly quotable lines from Richmond, VA artist Archangel.

All things considered, in a year where it feels as though quite literally anything could happen at any given moment, a record like the one that Soul Glo shorthandledly refers to as Yeet, one that features a violent and compelling sonic fusion that only they are capable of, is deeply necessary to times in which we currently find ourselves. In times where we are simply trying to survive from one minute to the next, one day to the next, it feels good in its own way, less lonely perhaps, to have music that reflects that uncertainty and fear.

Vocals: Pierce Jordan
Guitars: Ruben Polo
Bass/Vocals/Programming: Gianmarco Guerra
Drums: TJ Stevenson