album review: 'endure' by special interest

So here’s something about the modern era of punk I genuinely like: genre-bending and pop accessibility are no longer dirty words to them.

Now to be fair, even going back to the genesis of the genre there was always the desire to make something that stuck out of subversions and deconstructions of the genre, but it laid in tension with the reality that if it ever got too catchy or poppy, it could be appropriated by the industry and one’s values might crumble in the face of cold hard cash, better known as ‘selling out’. These attitudes hit their apex in the 90s and 2000s as punk saw its second mainstream revival, and as always it was more complicated than that. One of the key points of tension was how a poppier or more polished, electronic aesthetic became - in my opinion falsely - equated with a shift in attitude or ethics, evidence of mainstream commodification even if they maintained populism, but that wasn’t always true. Yes, selling the revolution from a major pulpit can be a flagrant hypocritical contradiction with high stakes, but the high reward is their message penetrating hearts and minds and getting that audience agitated for change - it doesn’t always work, but it can. Besides, that era tended to avoid conversations how guitar-driven hardcore genres and abrasive rage could be just as commodified or watered down without ‘changing the sound’, or how there were entire subgenres of electronic dance music that had radical politics, with roots that went back decades! And it’s a big reason I like how millennials and Gen Z are way more open to genre crossover and experimentation when it comes to synthesizing a revolutionary sound.

So enter Special Interest: a New Orleans-based group that broke out proper in 2020, with a blend of noisy glam punk and no wave that really impressed me with their grinding pulse-pounding grooves and the canny ability to balance vivacious sexuality and societal commentary - and how being Black and queer there was a very real overlap between the two. That album was one of the best of 2020, and when I heard that Endure was getting even more praise as they took further steps towards electronic music in techno and house without compromising their edge, I was excited - so how did we endure with this?

So this is an album that’s actually substantially more complicated to discuss than one might think - yes, it absolutely rules, one of the best of 2022 as the sort of harrowing, pulse-pounding project that can be deceptively accessible… until it hits you over the head with the sort of revolutionary firepower that you then realize was always in frame the entire time. This is an album that has the same militant spirit of Soul Glo’s Diaspora Problems, but has married it to a propulsive, seemingly-give-no-fucks attitude and populism that gradually reveals the tangible emotional stakes that honestly gives it a lot of heart that might go overlooked. In other words, there’s a lot going on where I’ll admit there were moments that could have easily thrown me and have already this year… but I kept coming back, and man, it was rewarding to do so.

And the first thing to highlight is the shift in sound that I implied, bringing in more elements of dance and house music to flesh out their noisy no wave and glam punk, and this also came with a shift in production. The seething, unstable guitarwork and jagged drum machines is still here but the focus is driving towards groove, with Nathan Cassiani’s basswork reminding me more than a few times of early Savages a decade ago in that stormy foundation. So while the sonic shift might be reminiscent of the pivots some punks took towards dance in the late 80s and 90s, the mix balance feels different - the grooves feel burlier with an incredibly fat low-end especially in the bass beats, the guitars spike and squeal to flesh out the melody, and Ali Logout’s vocals considerably more prominent, it’s not punk subsumed by house but augmented by it. And Logout deserves particular attention - she’s got the searing power of those vintage house divas and can vamp with the best of them, but on songs like ‘(Herman’s) House’ her cracking, cackling scream is way more raw, and she’ll bend off rhythm just often enough to keep you guessing, or even embrace a more theatrical delivery like on ‘LA Blues’ that if anything reminds me of a scene from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee - believe it or not, it was a comparison point I think is worth touching on more later. And while these are chaotic, noisy compositions - the howling call-and-response of ‘Foul’ is probably the most stark example, though I’d probably include ‘Impulse Control’ here as well - there are also cuts when the seething grooves soften for humid, borderline R&B dance jams like on the sinuous ‘Midnight Legend’, or the clattering gothic no wave of ‘Love Scene’; the growl is still there, but it’s refined….

Until it’s not. This was always a nocturnal album, but around ‘Kurdish Radio’ the Savages comparison becomes inescapable and I intend that as a massive positive: the bass picks up some incredible smolder as Logout’s delivery gets throatier and more martial, and while she’ll still coo, the undercurrent of barely contained rage feels palpable as the guitars roil and the synths feel more chillier. This could very easily function as a bait-and-switch - when we get to the content I’ll describe why it’s not - or a return to Special Interest’s more slapdash side, and while for ‘Impulse Control’ it’s close especially with how fragmented those pianos are, the polish and mix balance is still here, and you could easily still dance to all of it. But these are dances not just as revolution, but driving in service to them - if the first half of the album was pulling you into a fun night at a club, ‘Concerning Peace’ is the street fight at 1 AM when the creepy identitarian types who got thrown out an hour earlier for being handsy come back with their fashy friends and you have to crack heads on the pavement. And after that… hell, I was skeptical of the need for an interlude right before the closing track, but the somber guitars interweaving with the keys and steady beat are such a welcome breather as the feedback creeps in and the drums begin feeling oppressively loud that it feels like an incredibly grounding moment before the closing piece, a return to clanking, sizzling no wave as vintage synths and howling tremolo riffs well up around Logout’s increasingly heartbroken delivery as the pianos plink off the drum machines for the final emotive climax, which is an incredibly powerful moment to end the album.

But before I explain why, let’s get to the content, and it’s worth going back to the ideas that Special Interest was exploring on The Passion Of - it was an album that explored gentrification and poverty, and how both entrap and suffocate culture and those struggling to survive within that late capitalist paradigm, but also how a liberation can be found simply by living one’s truth underneath it, where sheer existence and open sexuality and its expression through art was its own brand of release and revolution. It’s certainly bleak and caustic and bratty, but it never felt nihilistic to me - brutally realist, but that can give an audience just enough of what they need. Endure, naturally, is the extension of those ideas, and the recognition that living within the bad system is not enough - you need something to galvanize a real revolution, and while you’re going to get the moments to entice you through the door, there are bigger, organizational goals in mind. And this is where we might as well talk about that revolution, because on the back half of this album Special Interest are not holding back on the necessity of violence: a foundational line on ‘Concerning Peace’ is echoing anti-colonialist sentiments of the past, in which violence might be the only mechanism to change the system altogether; the riot is the language of the unheard. And Special Interest are not alone in this - I already referenced Soul Glo but there’s also rappers like Ghais Guevara where you can tell they’re disillusioned with the modern brand of liberal activism that tends to elevate the individual in a capitalist paradigm but doesn’t lead to systemic change. For my part… more often than not I happen to agree with them, but said actions need to be targeted and surgical, and there’s a capricious angle to certain cuts on this album that expose how that’s not likely the reality. I’m appreciative they’re aware of this on songs like ‘Impulse Control’, and I’ll give them points for acknowledging that the sheer strain of living under systemic racism and late capitalism are a rationale for the rage, the emotional response and psychological strain that might trigger such a response, but I’m reminded of the critiques of punk that Derek Jarman included in Jubilee, not just in the commodification of the first wave of punk as empty sloganeering and aesthetic rather than values, but also that the kinetic rapture of violence could be self-destructive beyond the crossfire.

Thankfully, Special Interest seems aware of their history, and are closer to building counters. ‘(Herman’s) House’ is a solid example, referencing the 2012 documentary surrounding Herman Wallace, a Black Panther held in solitary confinement for decades after trying to improve conditions at his notoriously violent prison - he designed his dream house down to its fine details in the prayers he could get it built on release, only for him to die three days after that release, and for the planned land for it in New Orleans to get snatched up by developers, where even if you’re granted release, time and an exploitative system will ruin Black lives or - in a reference to Basquiat, make them just famous enough to be commodified. It underlies the tensions within the first half off the album, where they’re trying to find that reckless love on the dance floor or nightclub but it can’t pull you away from the harsh, entrenched systems that shape you - the psychological strain gets a reference to the 2014 TV movie 86 My Life on both ‘Foul’ and ‘Impulse Control’, but ‘Midnight Legend’ gets to a core of striving for that emotive connection even if it’s within systems that would individualize one’s struggle, trying to communicate across the breach, later echoed in the messy hookup on ‘Love Scene’ where the pain highlights at least some core of reality. That slides into ‘Kurdish Radio’ - arguably one of my favourite songs on the album - where it once again challenges the colonization of one’s mind, how much we really get when American imperialism and capitalism encourages us to view life as a zero sum game, even down to relationships - maybe love isn’t just an economy built on resource scarcity, the mirage of sanction, and ‘My Displeasure’ highlights a deeper sense of urgency in confronting these ideas, not just with climate change as a problem that liberal capitalism is not equipped to solve, but also as someone who could be easily cut down by police gunfire or just that ongoing tension in one’s mind. And after the martial call to action of ‘Concerning Peace’, ‘LA Blues’ is the moment where it snaps back to the human level, seeing the folks whose lives who have been trod underfoot and pushed to the brink of their humanity… and then Ali Logout gets personal, buckling under that strain and an unfair world and her own feelings of guilt and hypocrisy, where she finally reckons with the reality that the roots of it all have to come with the willingness to love and be loved in return. It’s the line you have to hold, the foundation of a communal movement where she admits the internal moral change is fundamental to breaking a bad system and building it into something new.

If all of this has the feel of translating manifestos… well, yeah, but when you’re stuck at the bottom of those systems you wind up doing the work that folks privileged enough to ignore it haven’t heard and don’t want to hear - again, it’s all about communication, and one of the reasons Endure is so excellent is because it can initiate the conversation with a real sense of populism and terrific grooves. This doesn’t feel like a curation of what house music can do to elevate one figure, but galvanizing the true history to spark a real change - and if that’s too much, it bangs with so much flair, variation, and potency that it’s damn near impossible to ignore. Handily one of the best albums of 2022, when I said Special Interest had so much Algiers-esque potential back in 2020, I’m thrilled to see them realize the first embers of it. This again will fly under the radars of a lot of folks - please, make the time, check it out!