When Denver five-piece Destiny Bond perform live, they shed pints of sweat like any hardworking hardcore band. But every once in a while, they lose more than just fluids; vocalist Cloe Madonna Janzen busted a tooth at a recent gig in San Antonio, Texas, marking the second time she’s lost one at a show. Aside from being punk as fuck, Janzen’s dental mishap encapsulates Destiny Bond’s spirit of inversion: Pain can be liberating, anger can be productive, and hardcore can be vulnerable. On their new album The Love, Destiny Bond mine these dualities and hone their sound into something that’s somehow crisper and more ragged all at once.
On their 2023 debut, Be My Vengeance, Destiny Bond leaned into the more melodic tendencies of the punk and emo they grew up on (AFI, Kid Dynamite, Sunny Day Real Estate), and Janzen slipped between phlegmy screams and cleaner yelps. On The Love, she commits entirely to grizzled shrieking, and her bandmates—guitarists Emily Armitage and Amos Helvey, drummer Adam Croft, and bassist Rio Wolf—dish out even heftier riffs, especially on the album’s quasi title track, “Can’t Kill the Love,” with its crackling guitar solo and burly backing vocals. The subsequent “Debt Perception” borrows from even gnarlier genres like power metal, between Croft’s walloping kick drum and Wolf’s crunching bass riffs.
As Destiny Bond’s lyricist, Janzen animates many songs with rallying cries for trans people such as herself (and Wolf), but she always strives to write for anyone struggling within their tight-knit scene. “Debt Perception” could be read as a screed against anti-trans legislation, or a manifesto against oppression in general. “You still won’t let us live,” Janzen screams, sawtoothed guitar surging just below her voice. “Now we swing as hard as the rest of them/You can’t keep us in.” It’s no coincidence that such a unifying song has one of Destiny Bond’s most shoutable choruses: “We bash back/Break glass/Keep score!”
On Be My Vengeance, Janzen’s lyrics were mainly focused on the Denver punk community, where Destiny Bond have proved a nurturing force. But the new album is more introspective, with Janzen taking a microscope to intra-band dynamics. Fist-pumping opener “Destiny Song” has the melodic lead guitar of 1990s pop-punk, and it functions as a rousing band theme (“I’m bound to you/You’re bound to me/Baby, we’re bound by/We’re bound by destiny”). But Janzen isn’t just singing arm-in-arm punk anthems; she wrote “Lookin’ for a Fight/Done Lookin” as an examination of her occasionally fraught friendship with drummer Adam Croft. “We had some aggression issues we had to work out,” she said of their dynamic in a recent Talkhouse conversation with Scowl’s Kat Moss. Janzen described the track as “a conversation between me and Adam, how I perceive our fights in my brain.”
A punk song of heightened emotional maturity, “Lookin’ for a Fight/Done Lookin” presents both Janzen and Croft as flawed and prone to prod each other’s wounds. The song is a breakneck burst of speed punk that reflects the bandmates’ charged relationship. Both are working at their highest wattage here—especially Croft, who bashes his drum kit at a feverish pace. Toward the end, a rhythmic shift denotes a change of heart. Atop a steadier tempo, Janzen scraps the feud and embraces Croft: “My home is right here/Wherever I find/Find you with me.” Sometimes, the pain is the cure.
