Laura Jane Grace has come to play. Across her decades-long discography with anarcho-punks Against Me! and as a solo artist, she has long mixed blistering protest songs with emotional slice-of-life confessions, veering from ideology to introspection and back again. But on her new album, Adventure Club, she turns up the lights to find bright spots amidst the darkness; the trauma and strife that have shaped her music lurk, but don't dominate.
Adventure Club’s organizing ideas are the same as many Laura Jane Grace albums: rage, pain, protest, love. But while Grace touches on moments of abject despair, Adventure Club mostly plays with rather than into the trans trauma narrative—the expectation that trans artists define themselves by, and make art about, traumatic experience—balancing darkness with bright surf-rock guitars and layered vocals. Throughout, she finds comedy in living through what feels like the end times, skipping over the executive orders and media screeds in favor of more slyly observed reflections.
Here, Grace is backed by a new band, dubbed the Trauma Tropes, who add a sense of levity behind Grace’s commanding leadership. Her vocals are full-bodied against the buoyant backing vocals of her wife, Paris Campbell Grace, and the music is swift and light on its feet. When Grace turns a winking eye on religion with “Your God (God’s Dick),” a rollicking two minutes of Lord-based cock-and-balls jokes in a takedown of religious overreach, it’s elevated by the chorus of the Trauma Tropes, their hymnal introduction ringing like a bell.
The collaborators don’t always strike the perfect balance, though. The band’s brightening effect is made more pronounced by their absence on “Free Cigarettes,” a strangled acoustic number that feels thin against the other tracks’ full-throatedness. Elsewhere, the clubhouse energy comes on too strong. “Espresso Freddie”—co-written with bassist Jacopo "Jack" Fokas about the band’s love of a particular Greek iced coffee drink—is too clearly an inside joke, not quite earning its place among the album’s more outward-facing material.
Adventure Club’s high points come when jagged guitar riffs throw Grace’s melancholy lyrics into sharp relief. On “Poison in Me,” Grace sings, “Let’s get drunk and drown our problems/I’m not sure I can live without them” over a convulsive beat. Together with the slacker-rock tinged “New Years Day,” the twin tracks explore two sides of alcoholic excess—the night before and the morning after—as Grace fights with herself to both drown and surface.
Where Adventure Club touches on queer and trans identity, Grace sidesteps themes of dysphoria and oppression and instead puts interpersonal and community dynamics under the microscope. Despite its title, the thundering takedown “Fuck You Harry Potter” isn’t actually about J. K. Rowling’s constant anti-trans crusade; instead, it was inspired by a drunken Brit who insisted Grace reminded him of Eddie Redmayne, oblivious or uncaring as to how that might land. Meanwhile, “Wearing Black” is a dizzying trip through Chicago Pride, on which Grace namedrops Jojo Siwa before declaring, “My Pride’s a riot/It’s not a parade,” disguising the track’s tongue-in-cheek anarchy under a cheerful marching rhythm.
On Adventure Club, Laura Jane Grace shifts focus to highlight a playfulness that has previously been marginal in her work. The political and religious right, generalized ignorance, and internalized trauma are all still present, pinned down under the blade. But she also finds lightness as she and the Trauma Tropes poke fun at minor indignities and major assholes. Grace has never shied away from life’s bleakest moments in her music. But here, she reminds us that she has another weapon in her arsenal: the ability to bring people together and laugh in the face of those who try to keep her down.
