Five Iron Frenzy Has Never Sounded Better

UPBEATS AND BEATDOWNS, the first album by the Denver-based band Five Iron Frenzy, opens with a song about the evil of manifest destiny and the genocide of Native people. In the second song, the protagonist gives all his money to a homeless man. The fourth track is about refusing to pledge allegiance to the American flag. This was in 1996. On an album sold primarily in Christian bookstores, by a band that played evangelical church basements.

Five Iron Frenzy is still making music and, earlier this year, put out the most caustically political album of their career, Until This Shakes Apart. Released days after the Capitol insurrection, the album pulls no punches in its criticism of evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpian politics. And the band has never sounded better.

After their sloppy, fun ska-punk days in the ’90s and their hit-and-miss, genre-hopping experiments in the early 2000s, the band broke up, reformed in 2011, and released the mature and muscular Engine of a Million Plots in 2013. Rejoined with songwriter Scott Kerr (who had left the band in 1998), the band found new purpose and energy as its songs became more introspective. The result was a record more in the vein of Jimmy Eat World than third-wave ska, ending with a song about uncertainty and hope rather than their previous, hymn-like closers. The band remains loud and dark, but Until This Shakes Apart is more explicitly influenced by older forms of ska, like reggae and two-tone. And where Engine of a Million Plots was introspective, this album points the finger outward. No one is safe from singer Reese Roper’s critique on this record, each song unleashing righteous anger at a different target: heartless immigration policy, gentrification of the band’s hometown, the Confederate flag, oil profiteering, and so much more.

The radical theologian Ched Myers once gave the advice, “Have one foot in the church and one outside. And keep your weight on the one outside.” Five Iron Frenzy has exemplified this for most of their career. They’re a band clearly informed by a deeply held faith, but never limited to the insular Christian scene, playing shows with progressive organizations like Food Not Bombs and Ska Against Racism. Roper and saxophonist Leanor Ortega Till were founders of the punk-friendly Denver church Scum of the Earth, which still operates as an “outpost on the perimeterf of the kingdom,” according to its mission statement. Several members of the band are now atheists, but Five Iron Frenzy continues to operate as a radically inclusive democracy—every member of the band gets paid the same salary.

This inclusivity fuels the album’s blistering punk closer, “Huerfano,” which details incidents of childhood bullying (reportedly drawn from the band members’ own experiences) before the soaring chorus declares, “Now fly you orphans / Here you belong / Welcome you wayward souls / Now lift your song.” After decrying the tragic state of so much of American Christianity, it’s a beautiful place to land: A reminder that no matter how messed up things are—as shouted in the background at one point in the track—“You belong!”