The initial single from Stockholm Syndrome (June 27), Fishbone’s first new album in nearly two decades, arrived shortly before last year’s presidential election. The bluntly titled “Racist Piece of Shit” pulls no punches regarding the ska-funk-metal pioneers’ feelings toward our current president and his supporters, even if musically, it’s a relatively unambitious (though scorching) tune. Eight months and a lot of bad news later, Fishbone’s still fuming, but they’ve worked hard to channel that fury into heavy, complex, and deeply idiosyncratic music that can stand up to their best material from the late 1980s and early ’90s.
The band began as a bunch of junior high misfits in South Central L.A. nearly 50 years ago, releasing their debut album, In Your Face, in 1986. After hitting their commercial peak in the early ’90s with two stints on the Lollapalooza tour and the metal-forward album Give a Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Center of the Universe, they went through a tumultuous series of breakups, reunions, diss tracks, and stylistic evolutions, while never quite reaching the massive popularity of their peers in the scene: Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction. Only singer Angelo Moore and keyboardist-trombonist Christopher Dowd remain of the band’s founding lineup, and Stockholm Syndrome (released June 26) marks the first of the band’s eight albums to not feature bassist Norwood Fisher (Tracey “Spacey T” Singleton re-joined the band in 2024 after more than two decades away). Despite the changes, Fishbone sounds as extravagant and eclectic as ever, still envisioning punk and metal as Black music by incorporating the syncopations and harmonies of ska, funk, doo-wop, soul, and early R&B.
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Ever since 1988’s Truth and Soul, Fishbone has shown an aggressive political awareness, but Stockholm Syndrome makes the band’s strongest statement yet. The song titles reflect the outrage of “Racist Piece of Shit”—“Last Call in America,” “Why Do We Keep on Dying,” “Secret Police” —with fittingly direct lyrics: “Hatred has consumed the nation!” Moore declares in the opening line of “Last Call in America,” before listing a series of other national afflictions including inflation, gas prices, tainted drinking water, and police brutality. These tracks move past the fuck-you simplicity of “Racist Piece of Shit,” while expanding on its musical language as well. “Last Call” features Parliament-Funkadelic legend George Clinton, one of Fishbone’s guiding lights, and melds the pulse of disco to the strut of James Brown. “Suckered by Sabotage” ably combines thrash, hard rock, and reggae, and “Secret Police” somehow sounds like a heavy metal Tears for Fears and might be the catchiest thing the band has ever written. The vaudeville-esque “Gelato the Clown,” meanwhile, proves that the band has lost none of its inimitable weirdness—it sounds like Ween combined with Tower of Power. Closing track “Love Is Love” wraps things up with a tender, soaring ballad reminiscent of another, much whiter, funk-metal group that outstripped Fishbone on the charts by going pop: Extreme.
Back in 1985, Fishbone called their debut single “Party at Ground Zero,” and though the Cold War context of that anthem has vanished, Fishbone is still getting down while the world hovers on the brink. If Moore, Dowd, and Co. are a little madder and broader in their approach now, it’s only because they believe their music can still make a difference, and they’ll do what it takes to be heard.
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