“Speaking for myself, this record might be a snapshot of me deciding whether I’m going to live out the rest of my life as Eckhart Tolle or live out the rest of my life as Ted Kaczynski,” laughs PROPAGANDHI guitarist and vocalist Chris Hannah. In true PROPAGANDHI fashion, the Manitoba, Canada based outfit’s eighth album, At Peace is smart music for dangerous times. “Everything I’m singing about is still coming from being the same person that wrote and sang our first record How to Clean Everything in 1993,” Hannah states recalling the band’s snarky skate-thrash origins. “But what we’re putting into the songs now, probably reflects more despair than 30 years ago when we had similar perspectives, but with strands of hope and naivete. Now it’s the existential dread of eking out a life worth living in this completely failed society.”
At Peace was written and recorded as political storm clouds were beginning to darken in the months before Emperor Trump’s ascent to power. It’s an album of poetic and polemic songs written shortly before the American oligarch’s suggestion that PROPAGANDHI’s home country become the U.S.’s 51st State. Songs like the album’s apocryphal “Fire Season” presages the climate-change-driven wildfires that wiped out portions of Southern California. At its core, At Peace is an album of inconvenient and unavoidable truths that hit with all the subtlety of an Orwellian boot stamping on a human face forever.
With mixing completed at Blasting Room Studios by Jason Livermore (Rise Against, Hot Water Music) in December 2024, At Peace is a portrait of the uncertainty facing the four members of PROPAGANDHI— Hannah, drummer Jord Samolesky, bassist/co-vocalist Todd Kowalski and guitarist Sulynn Hago. From the opening clarion call of “Guiding Light” into the album’s evocative title track, there’s no mistaking that on their first album in eight years, PROPAGANDHI’s frontline social activism has been supplanted by a deeper sense of reflection. Nearly a decade (including two inactive years for Covid) later, the members of PROPAGANDHI have a lot on their minds. “We’re definitely not a band that responds well to someone telling us we need to put something out,” the frontman states. “That happens when we have something to talk about – and now is definitely the time for that.” One listen to the album and it’s clear. Even in these darkest days, At Peace remains pure PROPAGANDHI.
