Nightmares Of The West might be Strike Anywhere’s first new music in over a decade, but in some ways the five-piece hasn’t changed at all. These seven songs – six brand new originals and a cover of “Opener” by London punks Blocko – are as full of fire and fury as anything the band has written since forming in Richmond, VA in 1999. At the same time, this EP infuses the band’s ideological vision with the perspective its members have now, both as people in general, but also as political activists and musicians currently living in the USA – somewhere that’s markedly different from how it was when Iron Front, their last album, was released in 2009.
“We wanted to write things that we felt really fresh about and that revealed something new,” explains vocalist Thomas Barnett. “It was almost like this refresh, this restart, where we found ways to write songs that not only moved us, but also reflected the times and our ages. But we definitely feel inspired, and this record is a platform for us to hopefully – in time – play shows, connect with community, and help keep those little fires lit in ourselves and in others through the music and those shared experiences. These songs are the conversations that we want to have and the feelings that we still really need to share.”
The seeds of those conversations and feelings were properly planted in 2017 in Brooklyn, when the band – completed by guitarists/backing vocalists Matt Smith and Mark Miller, bassist Garth Petrie and drummer Eric Kane – were on a bill with Hot Water Music. Because although there’s been no new music for a decade, Strike Anywhere still played the odd shows and still sent ideas to each other from their respective towns and would work on them when they were together. That night, it was “The Bells”, a song about retreading your past that specifically explores the ghosts of their hometown of Richmond.
“That night, we brought out the bones of that song,” says Barnett, “and just started playing it, like rapid fire around the room with Eric kind of playing his drum sticks on his lap, and we just started getting into it. And then we had this conversation that has a lot of chemistry and smiles, and we were talking about the songs like they were actually living and breathing.”
While there’s certainly a sense of heartfelt, poignant personal nostalgia ringing throughout “The Bells” at all the things and people that have been lost over the years – it is, of course, also underpinned by the political outlook and ideologies that have driven the band from their inception. So – like most songs the band have written over the years – while it’s specific in setting and inspiration, it’s universal in meaning, in message and in emotion.
“It’s about Richmond, our hometown, and a walk through the city i took after a good friend of mine died in a fire,” Barnett explains. “In the past 10 years since Iron Front, there’s also been a lot of loss, because obviously that’s what happens you get older – you lose friends and peers. So tucked into the record is that idea that of mourning and grieving, but knowing you don’t have to go it alone. But this song also deals with the loss and grief of non-human things – cities, time. Things that used to have a lot of depth and felt really robust, and now feel flattened by gentrification, flattened by raw capitalism squeezing out art spaces, squeezing out working class communities. It’s looking at the way cities change and who you lose, and where people have to go when they can no longer afford to live anywhere.”
That balance – at a crude level, between the political and the personal, though really it’s something much more nuanced than that – is found within the fabric of the rest of the EP’s songs, too. Recorded, like the band’s four albums to date, at Salad Days Studio in Baltimore by Brian McTernan, it starts with the blistering “Documentary” – another song riddled with an overwhelming sense of loss, and contempt and disgust with what society has become – bef