It’s been almost a decade since the last Downtown Boys LP, and the cost of living has never been higher. Corporations lay off workers en masse in hopes of replicating their labor with LLMs. The social safety net is gutted, funding for the arts slashed. The United States has just minted the world’s first trillionaire. The barrage of body blows to the collective consciousness is exhausting.
But Downtown Boys have never shied away from putting in the work. “Eres el desastre/No es mi límite,” Victoria Marie bellows on “No Me Jodas,” the opening track of their new album, Public Luxury. The activism and politics of the leftist Providence five-piece have been interwoven with their lives and music since the group’s formation. They know who the enemy is, and they’re not done fighting. In the years since their 2017 Sub Pop debut, they’ve formed other bands, soundtracked a film, fought in court on behalf of the most vulnerable, and organized music workers to get living-wage legislation before Congress. The new LP feels less like a return to form than it does the next chapter in a book—its characters older, wiser, and wearier, yet fueled by the same fire that led them to organize their fellow workers at the hotel where they first met.
“No Me Jodas” (“Don’t fuck with me”) might as well be a thesis statement for Downtown Boys’ whole deal. It shifts effortlessly from oozing sludge into bouncy dance punk without ever flagging, while Marie shouts fighting words of violent resistance with enough abstraction to expand the scope beyond their real-life inspiration. Across the album, she references Mexican rancheras (“Sirena”), deforestation and climate change (“No Me Jodas”), and the oppression of pro-Palestine and anti-ICE protestors (“You’re a Ghost”). And while much of the record bristles with fury, there’s still room for a little tenderness: Springsteen synths color the melancholy “Yellow Sun” that bleeds for the dying children of war (“Blessed are those who fight with fists against phosphorous skies”), capturing the unyielding beauty and abject terror of a clear, sunny day.
After the big-budget, big-name Cost of Living sessions with Guy Picciotto at Steve Albini’s Electric Audio, guitarist Joey La Neve DeFrancesco co-produced Public Luxury with Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets, a Pawtucket, R.I., arts space that hosted some of their earliest shows. The results are both expansive and propulsive, with songs fueled by rage and discontent but tracked clean enough to subtly experiment in new ways with texture. Mary Regalado’s bass rumbles through the intro to “Sirena,” covered in fuzz; on “You’re a Ghost,” Joe DeGeorge dabbles in some industrial crunch with his synth melody; and Marie’s voice rings throughout with ancestral gloom, drenched in reverb. The production doesn’t quite capture the barely controlled chaos of a Full Communism-era Downtown Boys show, where Marie might preach from the pulpit while the drummer moshes in the pit with his floor tom. Rather, it sounds more like what it is: a group of seasoned punks who are now better at playing their instruments and know their way around a studio. “Mi Concha” provides the clearest example of how that growth pairs with an unyielding spirit: The cover of an early track from Marie and DeFrancesco’s electro-cumbia side project Malportado Kids is more dynamic, yet sacrifices nothing of the pair’s bratty sneer (“Mi concha no es bastante blanca… chíngate, fuck you güey”).
It might seem contradictory for a band with a breakout LP titled Full Communism to be engaged in big-business affairs such as SXSW and Coachella, but the band’s ethos has always been rooted in delivering the experience of the working class to mainstream spaces, reclaiming rock music from the playground of the privileged and reframing it as labor. They’re not suckling at the teat of Philip Anschutz, they’re “workers of Coachella” castigating the AEG chairman for donations to anti-LGBTQ causes and underpaying employees at the festival. And on the new album, they channel their energy more efficiently than ever, their tone clear and their words direct. The concept of “public luxury” supposes not that the trappings of modernity are inherently evil, but that the public that works to create it is equally entitled to enjoy it. Public Luxury is less a dissertation on those tenets than an emotional response to the struggle to achieve it—mouths dripping with venom, eyes swollen with tears, hearts heavy with love. As an album, it prods us to dance, to kick and scream, and to weep. As an ethos, it reminds us that everything can be for everyone. You just can’t give up.
