Within days of No Kings I, The Armed gave us “Kingbreaker,” which could’ve easily served as the head-banging set’s theme song for the day. And then, less than two months later, The Armed unveiled The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, a long-form manifesto of the Detroit-based band’s opening salvo that made a spectacular case supporting the name of their latest album. Read my reflection on their LP as part of FLOOD‘s best albums of 2025 feature.
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Trivium, one of the hardest-working metal bands that also boasts an ever-reliably broad appeal, are close to clocking their 100th date in another year of rigorous touring. Their 2025 regiment has focused heavily on celebrating/resurrecting interest in their second full-length, Ascendency, a formidable effort – some might call it the Florida band’s breakthrough release – ostensibly because it came out 20 years ago.
But as Matt Heafy and company look back on that release – currently playing four selections from it in their current 14-song set, as The Bad Penny witnessed last month in Garden City, Idaho – we can’t help be reminded what short shrift Trivium continues to give 2006’s The Crusade, the successor to Ascendency. More specifically, we’re confused as to why the band continues to bury the record’s strongest tracks, which still constitute some of the best material Trivium have crafted in an admittedly cramped catalog with loads of compositions adored by fans of the band, thrash and metalcore, and even critics.
Chief among those neglected songs are The Crusade‘s opening track “Ignition”; first album single “Detonation”; and the most politically charged number in Trivium’s career, “Contempt Breeds Contamination.” Since Trump became president for the first time in 2016, the metal band has played all three songs two times in concert. Not apiece – combined.
The Bad Penny has knocked guitar maestro Heafy in the past for his sometimes substandard lyrics. But the ones he wrote for those aforementioned songs stand among his best-written, not to mention his most admirable. So why don’t we hear them – or, more importantly, the sentiments he expressed in those compositions – more often?
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“I feel, like, not so complacent, but enthused, honestly, in a great way. I feel good. It’s my job. I’m an artist, and that’s kind of what I need to do. I need to provoke and I need to demand answers and I need to challenge things.”
-Roddy Bottum
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With his new memoir The Royal We out now, I recently spoke with Roddy Bottum of Faith No More, Imperial Teen and Man on Man fame about a very wide range of topics. Read some of them in my FLOOD feature and my Bad Penny story (in which he recalled a bizarre incident involving his paranoid ex-girlfriend Courtney Love).
In this part of the interview, part of The Bad Penny‘s On Tyranny series, Bottum shares his first-hand accounts about the shameful and horrific acts occurring in the United States: the exodus of trans people leaving out of well-justified fear; and ICE attacks on immigrants, demonstrators and U.S. citizens.
But Bottum also discusses what he sees as a silver lining: The recent election of Democratic-Socialist Zohran Mamdani as the youngest-ever and first Muslim mayor of New York City. Here’s that portion of our wide-ranging conversation:
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Hello, Bad Penny readers. Surely you are familiar with and have probably read some installments of our ongoing On Tyranny series, which focuses on how Authoritarian America is damaging artists, their careers and their personal lives. This writer has been somewhat surprised at how tame and mild some of the editions are in this series, which is closing in on 65 installments.
This is not one of those installments.
Today’s entry comes courtesy of Morgan Y. Evans, who resides in Orange County, California, and whose Walking Bombs project is a solo and collaborative vehicle for Evans, writer Morgan Ywain Vink-Lainas Evans, and other compatriots of theirs. Yesterday, Walking Bombs issued a new single, a lo-fi version of the song “Barbaric Balconies,” which you can purchase for a buck and a half on Bandcamp here.
Much of Walking Bombs’ material conveys Evans’ rage against the machine, for lack of a better phrase, so what he shared with us for On Tyranny didn’t exactly come out of left field. We edited Evans’ submission a bit to make it a smoother read but left the artist’s message fully intact, as one of the core missions of this website is to defend and fight for freedom of speech, arguably the most important right in a democratic society. Just be forewarned that much of what follows is, as the kids say, “NSFW.”
That said, it’s real, unrestrained and from the heart. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that the rage expressed in this missive of sorts should be awakened in the hearts of each of us who are gravely concerned that democracy – which has already left the building, if you haven’t noticed – might never come back. As The Bad Penny says on the On Tyranny index page and often reiterates in entries, thank you to Evans and others for mustering the courage to speak out and inspire others to do the same when we realistically may lose the right to do so in the blink of an eye.
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Palm Ghosts’ Joseph Lekkas was all smiles when The Bad Penny caught up with him a little under a year ago. We connected with the bassist/singer in his residence via video conference call, and he was surrounded by his trio of devastatingly adorable dachshunds. Additionally, his long-running Nashville band, Palm Ghosts, were giddily on the verge of releasing new songs.
Fast-forward to roughly a month ago, when we checked in again with Lekkas and Palm Ghosts bandmate Benjamin Douglas (vocals, guitar, keyboards). We immediately noticed that they were burned out emotionally – and likely spiritually and physically as well – thanks to the terror that the Evil Empire Trump Administration is inflicting on the American public.
The Bad Penny (beta) 