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The Armed have announced a new album, Perfect Saviors, available August 25th, their first album since their breakout ULTRAPOP. Providing a full accounting of album contributors for the first time, Perfect Saviors was produced by the band’s Tony Wolski along with Ben Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen, with contributions from Julien Baker, Sarah Tudzin, Mark Guiliana, Patrick Shiroishi, Justin Meldal-Johnsen and many more (full contributors list below). The album was mixed by Alan Moulder. The news arrives with a first single, “Sport of Form,” which features Julien Baker on vocals and Iggy Pop playing God in the song’s visual.
Vocalist Tony Wolski offered this statement on the album: “Too much information has made us dumb and confused. Too many ways to connect have inadvertently led to isolation. And too much expectation has forced everyone to become a celebrity. Predictable primal dangers have given way to newer social ones. And the result is a world that is confounding and terrifying—but ultimately still beautiful. We hope thisrecord is exactly all of that, too. Perfect Saviors is our completely unironic, sincere effort to create the biggest, greatest rock album of the 21st century.”
Of the first single, “Sport of Form, he continued: There are two types of sport—those of measure and those of form. A sport of measure like basketball, football, or soccer has a point system and a sort of binary path to victory. A sport of form is something like diving, figure skating, or bodybuilding—something with evolving standards and a layer of subjectivity and some sort of critical component. The world that surrounds us is complex, and our lives are truly more akin to a sport of form than one of measure. Yet, so many people see it as exactly the opposite. Lyrically, this song is about the human need to win a game that we’re not even actually playing. Sonically, it is a reflection of that cognitive dissonance through a constant whiplash between beauty and ugliness, severity and tenderness, obscenity and grace.
The album concludes a trilogy of albums examining and dissecting what constitutes “pop culture” in a world of limitless information and access. Using “pop music” loosely as a format in which to express these ideas, each album used composition and presentation as a way to challenge these questions further. Perfect Saviors is the ultimate product of this evolution. Using one of the world’s most well-known mixing engineers to create a beautiful album fully immersed in the language and world of pop through the inherently unique, extreme, and perverse lens The Armed communicate their art. The album was written by The Armed and performed by Ken Szymanski, Randall Lee, Tony Wolski, Dan Greene, Ben Chisholm, Urian Hackney, Cara Drolshagen, Troy Van Leeuwen, Patrick Shiroishi, Sarah Tudzin, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Mark Guiliana, Matt Sweeney, Bryan Aiken, Jacob Bannon, Julien Baker (courtesy of Matador Records), Eric Avery, Stephen Perkins, Josh Klinghoffer, Chris Slorach, Zach Weeks, Brian Wolski & Derek Coburn.
