Cleveland duo Arms & Armour turn the machinery of exploitation into literal machinery on Chafe, a new track featuring Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire on guitar. It sounds as though it were recorded inside a drill bit factory because that was exactly the case. The song emerged from the band’s Dark Current studio, housed within a 140-year-old former factory.
Grinding industrial noise, electronics and doom-heavy post punk create an atmosphere of physical pressure. Boeckner’s guitar cuts through the mechanical density while the arrangement advances with the force of an assembly line stripped of any human purpose. Gothic shadow hangs over the track, but its hostility remains rooted in the material world.
Chafe addresses the sustained crushing of the working and middle classes beneath impersonal authoritarian systems. It shares thematic ground with the band’s earlier single, Terror by Night, though here the pandemic context has disappeared, leaving a broader condemnation of structures built to extract and control.
Arms & Armour consists of Lauren Voss and John Panza, who produced, engineered and mixed their forthcoming album, The Hunted, themselves. Recorded throughout 2025 and 2026 and mastered by Brad Boatright at Portland’s Audiosiege, the album arrives September 4th, 2026 through Sweet Cheetah Records.
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Arms & Armour
Sweet Cheetah Records
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