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**The Armed - Ultrapop ★★★★☆**

In an era where extreme music often feels trapped between nostalgic pastiche and algorithmic predictability, The Armed have consistently operated as agents of beautiful chaos. Their 2021 opus *Ultrapop* arrives like a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of contemporary hardcore, shattering expectations while somehow managing to sound both utterly deranged and strangely accessible.

The Detroit collective – whose membership remains as deliberately opaque as their artistic intentions – spent the years leading up to *Ultrapop* systematically dismantling the very notion of what heavy music could be. Their 2018 breakthrough *Only Love* had already signaled their willingness to smuggle pop sensibilities into the most unforgiving sonic territories, but nothing quite prepared listeners for the full-scale genre terrorism that would follow.

*Ultrapop* functions as both manifesto and Trojan horse, a record that weaponises melody against the very audience that might resist it. The Armed have always been conceptual provocateurs, treating their anonymity and rotating cast of collaborators as part of a larger artistic statement about collective creativity versus individual ego. Here, that philosophy reaches its logical extreme – a record that feels simultaneously authored by everyone and no one.

Musically, the album exists in a parallel dimension where Dillinger Escape Plan discovered ABBA, or where Max Martin was raised on a steady diet of Converge records. The opening salvo of "Ultrapop" sets the template: crushing metalcore precision married to hooks so infectious they border on the obscene. It's a sound that shouldn't work, like putting a tuxedo on a wolverine, yet somehow emerges as the most natural thing in the world.

"All Futures" stands as perhaps the album's most audacious moment, a three-minute sugar rush that manages to be both the heaviest and most melodically sophisticated thing The Armed have ever committed to tape. The track's central hook burrows into your brain with the persistence of a particularly virulent earworm, while the rhythm section operates with the controlled violence of a precision demolition. It's pop music for the end times, optimistic nihilism set to a beat you can actually dance to.

Equally essential is "Faith in Medication," which finds the band channeling their inner Depeche Mode through a filter of pure sonic aggression. The song's pharmaceutical metaphors feel particularly resonant in our current moment, while its synthetic textures create an unsettling beauty that lingers long after the final breakdown. "Big Shell" offers perhaps the album's most straightforward hardcore moment, yet even here The Armed can't resist threading unexpected melodic DNA through the brutality.

The genius of *Ultrapop* lies not just in its individual songs but in its cumulative effect. This is music designed to rewire expectations, to create new neural pathways between pleasure and pain, beauty and violence. The Armed understand that the most subversive thing you can do in 2021 isn't to be heavier or weirder than everyone else – it's to be genuinely catchy while maintaining your artistic integrity.

Producer Ben Chisholm's contribution cannot be overstated. His work here creates a sonic landscape that feels both claustrophobic and expansive, intimate and stadium-sized. Every element exists in perfect tension with every other element, creating a mix that reveals new details with each listen while never losing its immediate impact.

In the three years since its release, *Ultrapop* has established itself as something of a watershed moment for heavy music. Its influence can be heard rippling through the work of countless younger bands who've suddenly realised that hooks and heaviness aren't mutually exclusive territories. The album has managed to convert both pop skeptics in the metal world and metal skeptics in the pop world, creating a genuinely new audience for genuinely new music.

The Armed's greatest achievement with *Ultrapop* is making the impossible seem inevitable. This is music that feels like it was always meant to exist, even though nothing quite like it had existed before. In a cultural moment defined by polarisation and false choices, The Armed have created something genuinely synthetic – not a compromise between extremes, but a third option that renders the original binary obsolete.

*Ultrapop* stands as proof that the most radical thing any artist can do is follow their vision to its logical conclusion, regardless of whether that conclusion makes sense to anyone else. The Armed have created their masterpiece by refusing to create anything that could be easily categorised as such.