Sub Pop – August 11th
Power and oppression have long informed Rhode Island’s Downtown Boys. Cost Of Living, the follow-up to their brilliant 2015 debut Full Communism, sees them continuing to fight for what’s right. The surging ‘Lips That Bite’ presses you to fight back (“It’s about time… to take back my hand”), while Victoria Ruiz has so much conviction on white supremacy-tackling ‘Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas)’ that, even if you don’t speak Spanish, you’ll want to figure out her message and act on it. ‘Heroes’ might just be a snippet of spoken word, but it holds just as much strength, sampling hacktivist Aaron Swartz speaking of those who “didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission”. In these uncertain times, Cost Of Living is a necessary guiding force to political agency.
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