Incendiary Pittsburgh punk rockers Anti-Flag will release their 13th album Lies They Tell Our Children on January 6 via Spinefarm.
As a taster, the band have shared the album’s first track, “Laugh. Cry. Smile. Die.,” featuring Silverstein’s Shane Told. The song arrives with a video lensed by the INDECLINE Activist Art Collective, which you can watch below. The song takes a deep, hard look at climate change.
“Look, this is our 13th album,” the band declares. ”There’s no other way to put it: Lies They Tell Our Children is the best f_king version of Anti-Flag we have ever been. We haven’t been afforded the privilege and ability to spend every day together writing and focusing on every detail of an album in well over a decade and I think you can feel that collaboration and collectiveness in these songs more than any other record of ours. That collaboration was only extrapolated on with the inclusion of the eight guests who are featured on the album, spanning genres, years of friendship, and a vast array of perspectives.”
A-F continue, “The album itself is the first conceptual album the band has ever done, spawned out of a compulsive need to not just comment on the dystopian corporate wasteland we all face but to trace it back to the origin of this fate; the political policies, laws, cultural shifts, and lineage of injustice that have led us to the world we live in today.”
The band finish: “Like the band itself, of course the album is an anti-war statement both in the literal and figurative sense. This is an important moment in history and demands an urgent response, but we thought it was also important that we retrace our footsteps to the beginning of these issues. In order to better understand how to eradicate climate devastation, imperialism, war based economics, systems predicated upon racism, and the increasing belief that these things do not even exist, you have got to take people to the source. This idea is the crux of The Lies They Tell Our Children; put this wretched history in their face and demand their empathy.”
As mentioned, the album features multiple notable guest appearances, including Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath, Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach, and more. Details are in the full track listing below. Lies They Tell Our Children was recorded, produced and mixed by Jon Lundin.
Lies They Tell Our Children includes the following tracks:
“Sold Everything”
“Modern Meta Medicine” (Feat. Jesse Leach of Killswitch Engage)
“Laugh. Cry. Smile. Die.” (Feat. Shane Told of Silverstein)
“The Fight Of Our Lives” (Feat. Tim McIlrath of Rise Against + Brian Baker of Bad Religion)
“Imperialism” (Feat. Ashrita Kumar of Pinkshift)
“Victory Or Death (We Gave ’Em Hell)” (Feat. Campino of Die Toten Hosen)
“The Hazardous”
“Shallow Graves” (Feat. Tré Burt)
“Work & Struggle”
“NVREVR” (Feat. Stacey Dee of Bad Cop/Bad Cop)
“Only In My Head”