Downtown Boys’ Political Party Music Is Filled With Rage and Delivered With Joy

To portray the band as activists first, musicians second ignores what truly makes them one of the most exciting acts in the nation—namely, that their music is just as radical as their politics.

IMAGE: Farrah Skeiky.

Downtown Boys aren't here to save punk, and they're damn sure not here to save your newly woke ass.

Granted, it's a tempting narrative to pin on them. With Donald Trump in the White House, the country is desperate for new insurrectionist heroes, and a self-described "bi bilingual political dance sax punk party" band seems like the ideal saviors to lead us to the other side of our national nightmare. But the Rhode Island quintet, dubbed "America's most exciting punk band" by Rolling Stone, didn't just wake up last November and decide to take on white supremacy, the police state and the capitalist power structure—they've been doing that since the halcyon days of 2011.

And furthermore, they're not just shouting at the ruling class. Especially now, the group is equally loud in challenging their own audience, or at least a segment of it, to confront their complicity in making the world such a shit pile and daring them to move beyond platitudes of allyship toward conversations that should make anyone still in denial about their own privilege feel deeply uncomfortable.

In other words, Downtown Boys will gladly show you the tools for resistance. But don't expect them to do the work for you.

"I think one of the big misconceptions is that we're out there 100 percent as a protest call," says singer Victoria Ruiz the morning after a recent show in San Antonio, Texas, her voice showing the ravages of the night before. "That can be tough, because being a punk band and being seen as a protest-music band are both fine things. But I think it takes away from what we're trying to do, and some of the nuance, in the music and the message, can be lost."

It's a misconception the band is having to deal with more frequently. With the release of Cost of Living, their third album and first for indie heavy-hitter Sub Pop, Downtown Boys are receiving more attention than ever before, which means there are more chances for their artistic goals to be misrepresented in the media. And a big one, they say, is the tendency to isolate their message from the music that's carrying it.

To be fair, it's easy to see why that happens. Even in an age of increased political awareness, where everyone from Katy Perry to Iron & Wine seems to have their eyes open to injustice, there are few bands who work quite as hard to live up to their rhetoric as they do. All the members have worked, and continue to work, with labor organizations in their hometown of Providence. Ruiz and founding guitarist Joey La Neve DeFrancesco oversee Spark Mag, an online magazine dedicated to progressive art, and it's clear from hearing any interview with them that their understanding of the issues runs deeper than slogans and extended middle fingers.

But to portray the band as activists first and musicians a distant second ignores what truly makes Downtown Boys one of the most exciting bands in the nation—namely, that their music is just as radical as their politics. While steeped in the chaotic thrum of hardcore, the band doesn't simply bludgeon with rage. In case you missed it, the group describe themselves as a "dance sax punk party," and in their wild, communal live shows especially, they mine the cathartic joy of screaming back at oppression.

Indeed, the not-so-secret weapon is brass. Acting as a melodic counterpoint to Ruiz's larynx-shredding shout, saxophonist Joe DeGeorge cuts through the clamor as often as he contributes to it, lending their working-class screeds a hint of Springsteenian drama, which isn't a coincidence—the band's name is taken from an early Boss lyric, and they do a wicked cover of "Dancing In the Dark."

On Cost of Living, the band brought in Fugazi's Guy Picciotto to produce, and expanded their sonic palette further, adding keyboards, more expansive arrangements and an overall richer sound, at least compared to their basement recording days. But if the music has gotten a few shades brighter, the lyrics have only become more pointed. Written over the course of two years, from the onset of the Black Lives Matter movement through to the election, the songs are Ruiz's attempt to capitalize on her generation's political awakening and take the discourse to the next step, beyond sentiment and into personal accountability.

"Seeing how neo-liberalism and progressivism is playing out right now, more and more, people are OK with saying 'Black Lives Matter,' or that racism against black and brown people is wrong," Ruiz says. "But the question becomes, are we getting closer to a demand around that? Are we becoming more comfortable with understanding that might mean demilitarizing the police, or it might mean a pay deduction for rich white people in order to shift those resources to poor brown people? So, I think the lyrics and the ideas get more at that discomfort of what it actually means to talk about freedom, and in order to do that, it has to be more personal."

From the very onset, Ruiz refuses to let anyone off the hook. On rousing opener "A Wall," which the band says is not explicitly a reference to the wall you're thinking of, she implores the listener to consider the role they play in erecting structures of division, both metaphorical and literal. "I'm Enough (I Want More)" takes a shot at those who can still afford to straddle fences, while "Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas)," one of three songs sung in Spanish, calls for the dismantling of the white colonial mind state. Strongest of all is "Promissory Note," which Ruiz describes as "speaking directly to a power dynamic, where one person feels they're more entitled to emotional space or physical space than another." It contains perhaps the album's most powerful line, which speaks to the band's refusal to kill themselves so others can live more comfortably: "I won't light myself on fire to keep you warm."

"I don't think we do this because people need it," Ruiz says of their motivations. "We do it because we see it as our way to express and be part of our greater political and cultural context. It's sort of our vessel for navigating this moment."

SEE IT: Downtown Boys play Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Lithics, Cool Flowers and Little Star, on Thursday, Sept. 21. 9 pm. $13. 21+.

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