Release Date: 25 March 2022
Label: Epitaph
Packaging Type: Digipak
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 8714092785326
Release Date: 10 February 2023
Label: Secret Voice Records / Deathwish Inc
Packaging Type: Slip Sleeve (CD or Vinyl)
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 723314784076
Description
In case you weren't already aware, Soul Glo are one of the most excitingly vicious and vital hardcore bands currently making their way through the underground. Their hard work and dedication to their craft is paying off too, as they have just signed to Epitaph and will be releasing their new album, Diaspora Problems this Spring 2022.
Philadelphia is a city ripe for a black and brown punk reclaiming. Entire movements have thrived for more than a decade dedicated to promoting art and music by marginalized people. Enter Soul Glo, a band etching dark, interpersonal screeds on ancient parchment cut from the skin of the rotting corpse of hardcore punk. Their music travels pedal-driven through lush, dense shoe-gaze forests, bursting out of the other side screaming. Lead singer Pierce Jordan's voice is an unmatched wail that snakes through the band's wiry punk orchestration as a truly exhaustive vessel for his trauma-informed lyrics.
Since their formation in 2014, Soul Glo have used hardcore punk music as a catalyst to speak about the intersectionality of gender and race in the American political landscape, and the black lived experience. Soul Glo's lyrics are uncompromising, written to raise awareness of social justice issues and designed to make you look inward. The band is known for their political lyrics on fraught topics like gender, race, and the Black experience in America and use their platform to raise awareness of pressing social justice issues.
Soul Glo is Pierce Jordan (vocals), Ruben Polo (guitar), Gianmarco "GG" Guerra (bass, vocals, programming), and TJ Stevenson (drums).
Description
Late December 2020 found Soul Glo holed away in an unfinished warehouse, beginning to find drum tones for their upcoming full length, Diaspora Problems. They had just begun to accept that they would be in talks with Epitaph Records, and that it was likely they were going to go with the label as they hadn't even begun to reach a place where they could consider shopping it to other record labels. Working with Epitaph was far and away the best case scenario that the band could've hoped for, but they simultaneously wondered if the label had any understanding of what they were getting into.
From 2016 to 2021, Soul Glo conceptualized and produced Diaspora Problems nearly completely alone. The demo and tracking process was handled exclusively by the band's bassist GG and engineer/close friend Evan Bernard. The final tracks were recorded in that same unfinished warehouse and the band's practice space during the hottest parts of summer 2021.
Thematically, Diaspora Problems is a simple analysis of where Soul Glo currently finds themselves: poised to leap into their future, for better or worse, with nothing but their life experience and lessons learned to communicate, and only each other to rely on. Lyrically, the album deals with analyses of the music industry as it exists through the eyes of people who are experiencing it for the first time. Aside from that, the concepts explored include an artist and individuals' self-doubt and self-hate, past traumas that can only be worked out in adulthood, financial instability and how it affects an artist, the effects of institutional and state violence, and the power of community that delivered Soul Glo through each struggle the band has endured from their inception and before.
Diaspora Problems is only the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a bright future for Soul Glo, as well as a forecast for what the band is capable of musically. Hardcore punk is at the precipice of a sonic revolution as a higher variance of people find room for themselves and the expression of their lived experience within the genre. More and more people will be injecting a cultural identity and offering a narrative previously unheard and/or underappreciated by punk rockers and kindred spirits the world over. Diaspora Problems is not aiming to be the only album like it that exists, but instead one of many entries in a new dawn for rock music.
Tracklisting
Tracklisting
Pennywise
The Blood Brothers
Down By Law
Rancid
NOFX
NOFX
Bad Religion
Dropkick Murphys
Soul Glo
