Today, we are pleased to debut the new track by Philly's Solarized!
"10s across the Borg" is a mass of red hot, combustible hardcore. The band's vocalist Alex Smith told us all about it: "We’ve played this song live for awhile, “10s Across the Borg” combines sci-fi imagery with the queer afro-punk energy of the vogue/house movement. Lyrically I’m trying to bridge the gaps between the diverse scenes that influenced me and that oversaw the whole record-- Sun Ra’s arkestra, living in Philly for 15 years, being involved tangentially with voguing and ballroom scene, afrofuturism. It’s important to recognize other aspects of the cultures that I’m a part of while making punk rock music, it can be frustratingly white, homogenous culture that is super rigid, so I need to break that up when I am a part of creating heavy music by offering my own take on it. I never understood why heavy music has to follow certain paths, be palatable to only certain scenes and communities and sound a very certain way. If literally anyone can pick up a guitar and throw it around a basement, why does that have to mean that there is only one way to communicate that-- through these shitty, gate-kept, ultra-white, super conservative avenues where Black people, queer people, have very little social capital?
The song is also an homage to how amazingly queer, Black and Brown Philly’s LGBT nightlife scene used to be. I remember going downtown and being surrounded by queer Black people absolutely taking over. Now the whole “gayborhood” is way less gay and decidedly less hood and it’s boring. The same people own all the restaurants and clubs down there and there is consistent anti-Black racism and the straights have taken over. So I wrote a song that tries to encapsulate the frustration, joy and nostalgia of those kinds of moments-- when queer POC just take over shit and reclaim and refashion.
Musically the song is just on some other shit, the whole album really. Kinda doing a sound that isn’t really done much anymore in punk or “hardcore” (groan) sadly, but it’s the sound that got me into punk, into real underground punk rock, in the first place. Like Gravity and Ebullition records type bands that had an artfulness to the rage. So like all the breakdowns in the song that Joe and Jeff created kind of reminded me of vogue and house beats, so it was necessary to rep that culture lyrically and conceptually. Dig it."
A Ghost Across Hell from ME is out on LPand Cassette on October 11th via SRA Records. You can pick it up here. Meanwhile, check out the new tune below, right now!