Here’s your litmus test for Laura Jane Grace’s latest: What’s your reaction to the lyric, “Does your god have a big, fat dick, ’cause it feels like he’s fucking me”?
If you laughed or pumped your fist in the air, this album is for you.
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If you in any way recoiled, please move along.
Of course, to anyone already aware of Grace, her ability to divide audiences is not surprising. First with her iconic band Against Me! and now as a solo artist with rotating backing bands, LJG has spent almost three decades turning the political, the personal, and the intersection of the two into earnest-yet-caustic, sledgehammer-hard punk anthems. She’s a voice of catharsis to everyone who’s angry at America’s status quo, and according to Fox News, “pure evil.”
Grace’s latest album, Adventure Club (July 18), follows suit, but with an unanticipated new element: fun. As in, Grace sounds like she’s having genuine fun making this music. Her past albums have been a blast to listen to—full of righteous, raging energy punctuated by the occasional darkly funny or ironic lyric—but seemed to come from Grace’s pain and anger. Adventure Club finds Grace creating from a lighter place. “You God (God’s Dick)” is a great example. Any of Grace’s albums could include a critique of how organized religion is used to justify taking away another group’s rights, but only this one features a Queen-esque choir intro and witty double entendres like “If he grows all the trees, does he taste every peach?” And yes, it also features single entendres like, “Does he shoot wads of honey and cum twice on Easter Sunday?” Fun doesn’t have to always be clean or clever.
One reason behind this shift could be that Grace wrote and recorded this album outside the U.S. Many of these songs came from Grace’s time at an artist residency program in Athens, Greece. This change of scenery comes through subtly in the more global, “You’re not the only one” perspective of her anti-capitalist rocker “Mine Me Mine,” and more explicitly in her ode to Grecian iced coffee, “Espresso Freddie.” The latter is as cheery a song as you’ll find in Grace’s catalog, but it’s welcome here, as it’s almost Grace’s way of admitting that, yeah, she’s allowing herself to enjoy life these days.
You can also see this change in Grace welcoming her new wife, Paris Campbell Grace, onto the album. Paris provides vocals on all tracks and co-wrote two, including the grooving, playful “Wearing Black,” which finds the couple carving out space for their unique queer identities by wearing black to the pride parade amidst the more standard, rainbow-clad LGBTQ+ community.
Or maybe Grace’s more confident, comfortable attitude is her discovering what it means to be punk in your mid-40s. She’s still fighting the good fight, particularly on the album’s closer, a beautifully sad slow-burn about life in prison, “Walls.” Yet many songs here—and definitely the album’s highlights—find the singer accepting that her evolution is ongoing. She can be doing better AND still struggling, whether it’s accepting that old highs won’t be reached again (“I Love to Get High”), old pain can’t be outrun (“Active Trauma”), and that even a life on the road in an underpaid punk band comes with certain joys if you know where to look (“Free Cigarettes”). And she’s tackling it all with catchy melodies, driving riffs, and inviting harmonies that, honestly, might be a touch too polished for her more dogmatic punk fans. But not for me. I like this new space Grace has found for herself. Not that she cares. Grace might not be an artist for everyone, but Adventure Club shows she’s happy doing things her way.
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