On March 20, a month after Parkland, a high school student in Great Mills, Md. fatally shot his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey. The same day, the Baltimore five-piece War On Women released “Lone Wolves,” the opening track of their second album, Capture the Flag. “They don’t care if you live/They don’t care if you die/It’s only ever been about control,” frontwoman Shawna Potter seethes. She has said the song is about gun control and “the terrorism of entitled, angry white men that isn’t called terrorism”; she almost called it “Pulse.” “Then the analysts wonder if he got enough hugs,” Potter sings, “Another cycle of ‘too early to mention guns.’”
If, at best, subversive ideas can sneak into popular culture like a Trojan horse—with radical thought encoded rather than didactically stated—then War On Women pay this no mind. Their eviscerating alt-rock never backs down from the supposed trappings of protest music. War On Women state the facts. They are self-righteous. They point fingers. Activism is prominently at the heart of their screeds against the systematic plagues of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. The enemy is everywhere. War On Women prioritize taking it down.
Last summer, this uncompromising approach found War On Women thoroughly out-of-step at the roving mall-punk summit Warped Tour. In a groundbreaking move, they brought a booth to promote “Safer Spaces” and teach festival-goers about bystander intervention. “There’s actually very few people who do what War On Women do,” Kathleen Hanna said in an interview about the Capture the Flag song she lent vocals to, “YDTMHTL.” “We do such similar work in the world that I felt an immediate shorthand with them.”
Like Bikini Kill in the 1990s, War On Women are on a fearless mission to change their subculture. (Potter, like Hanna, is herself an activist: She founded the Baltimore chapter of Hollaback!, the anti-street harassment nonprofit.) But while War On Women self-identify as a hardcore band, they largely slick their edges here, thanks in no small part to co-producer J. Robbins of post-hardcore progenitors Jawbox. The effect is accessible but merciless, more AFI than G.L.O.S.S., or a less aesthetically-minded White Lung. Only a handful of War On Women’s new songs adopt the traditional markers of hardcore—aggression, d-beat rhythms, air-tight rage—though these are their best ones. Their fury makes topics like reproductive justice, racist monuments, and female genital mutilation sound as gnarled and unfriendly as they ought to: “You tie us up in red tape/It’s red because we’re soaking in blood,” Potter screams on “The Violence of Bureaucracy.” Potter once said that her dream lineup for Warped Tour would include Babes in Toyland, Brody Dalle, Hole, Against Me!, and Katy Perry—all a testament to War On Women’s brick-heavy and yet manicured feminist rock schema, dynamic and massive.
Potter measures her antagonizing shouts, metallic roars, and cool-headed singing through powerful lines like “Our existence is our resistance/And your fear of us is our ammunition.” The album’s title track pivots on a hurtling, thrilling refrain: “You wanna legislate it/But you can’t even name it!” Its shredded gang vocals are pure solidarity. This is the collective sound of people who have felt in the depths of their souls the non-negotiable need for abortion rights, the anxiety of a pregnancy test, how fucked it is to not be able to afford Plan B. The proverbial flag appears to be a symbol of everything patriarchy wants to strip away, just to wield power over you. Capture the Flag is the sound of brazenly, corporally, unrepentantly fighting back. Its peak comes among the mathy riffs and group screams of the Hanna-featuring “YDTMHTL.” The same way a mainstream band like Rage Against the Machine made it a visceral joy to chant “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” War On Women make it life-affirming to empty your lungs in the name of their pitched rallying cry: “YOU DON’T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE!!!” War On Women are not raging against the machine so much as blazing through the very water and air that keep capitalist heteropatriarchy alive.
Capture the Flag’s lyrics can at times be so on-the-nose as to recall the earliest waves of women’s-lib folk and pop in the 1970s: “I’ll never, never be a silent woman,” Potter sings on the mid-tempo “Silence Is the Gift.” The most literal songs don’t always land. Still, the bleakness of the Trump era has carved space for them. A song called “Predator in Chief,” in which Potter sings of punching Nazis and the hypocrisy of the flag, can right now feel patently heroic. It is hopeful to imagine a room popping off to the sound of Potter wailing “I’ll show you the meaning of fear” or “Fuck this fucking rapist.”
War On Women’s purpose is so clearly delineated on Capture the Flag that the band included a 16-page “companion workbook” with the album. The idea of making punk-adjacent music friendly to academia might seem antithetical to such an anti-authoritarian band, but the Capture the Flag workbook is remarkably illuminating. It (thankfully) does not set out to teach students about “punk,” but rather about the themes of the record, presenting lyrics, some context (Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde are mentioned), and links to further reading. There is a series of incisive questions to accompany each song, with “Lone Wolves” suggesting the prompts: “How are misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia related?” “Connect the lyric ’too early to mention guns’ with a current article on the GOP reaction to gun violence,” and “How much money does the NRA donate to Republicans?” Whether in the form of homework, a festival performance, or this defiant album, the curriculum of War On Women ought to be widely assigned. We should arm teachers, and ourselves, with this.
