Hello and welcome to College Radio Charts! You’ve been incredibly busy these past few months. How has your 2025 been so far?
2025’s been busy—equal parts despair and exhilaration. As Antonio Gramsci said: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In our case? Maybe it’s pessimism of the creator, optimism of the political art project. Over the past few months, we’ve dropped new tracks and kept building this little ecosystem of our left-wing synth pop music. More and more people are finding the songs, and I hope that’s because people feel what we’re feeling. That means everything. We feel immense despair about what’s happening in the U.S.—and globally. We feel rage. We’re staying busy: releasing two songs a month in protest of the Trump administration and the wider system that produced it—the capitalist system of extraction and exploitation that stretches far beyond the U.S. We’re committed to writing political songs for at least the next four years. Maybe longer. It’s a labor of love. Of necessity. Of resistance. And whatever this is—this art project, this glitch—it’s a coping device. Maybe more. It is what keeps us going.
Debt Shop Boi feels more like a movement than just a music project. Do you see yourself as a musician first?
That’s such a good question—and honestly, we don’t totally know the answer. Debt Shop Boi started with a way of understanding the world, and a will to change it—somehow, some way. We’re bookish. We’re nerds. We read a lot—probably too much—especially books from Verso, Pluto Press, Haymarket, and their extended networks of journals and magazines. We like music, but it’s never just been about the music. It’s a vehicle. Sometimes, it’s therapy—because yeah, we’re tired of radical Left politics-as-usual, and looking for new ways to express ourselves, and to connect with people. So no, we don’t really see ourselves as “musicians first” in the traditional sense of composing, recording, publishing, and playing songs as a profession, to make a living. We’re readers, writers, artists, agitators, storytellers. We use synths and pop hooks the way comrades use protest signs, zines, memes, or BreadTube videos. That said, we care about the songs. The better the lyrics, the further they resonate, and maybe even move people. At the end of the day, Debt Shop Boi is about a collective coming-to-grips with the mess we’re in, the urgency of a political imagination that points beyond what is, and the weird joy that can still be found in creative resistance.
Your sound is equal parts dancefloor euphoria and dystopian dread. How do you balance rebellion with escapism in your music?
Ah, you got it—that’s the tightrope we’re walking. We live in a time when everything feels like it’s crumbling—world orders, empires, ecosystems, governments, democracies, collective dreams, even our mental health—and we’re expected to just vibe through it like nothing’s wrong. It’s the time of monsters, as Antonio Gramsci put it, where the old is dying and the new can’t quite be born. So we make music that expresses that tension. The rebellion is in the lyrics, the mood, the refusal to pretend everything’s fine. The fun? That’s in the beat, the synth lines, the anthemic choruses. We’re not interested in pure despair—there’s enough doomerism in the air already—and we’re not hawking hope as a product. No “cruel optimism,” as Lauren Berlant warned us about. What we are trying to do is create sonic space—on your dancefloor, in your earbuds, in your mind—for people to feel the full emotional chaos of now. Sadness, rage, joy, irony, exhaustion, desire, curiosity, earnest commitment. That restless urge to do something, even if you don’t quite know what. Sometimes resistance means shouting in the streets. Trolling fascists on X. Other times it means cracking a beer or sparking a joint after an alienating shift at the warehouse or the grocery store, and singing along to a song that tells you it’s okay to refuse capital’s grip on your lifetime—and to claim leisure, pleasure, and knowledge on your own terms. So yeah, it’s not about escaping reality. It’s about confronting it—with glitter on.
There’s a defiant DIY ethos in your production—raw, urgent, unapologetic. Is that a conscious aesthetic choice, or is it more about practical constraints?
Oh, it’s both—absolutely both. We’ve got day jobs. We’ve got night jobs. We work around the clock—24/7 capitalism, as Jonathan Crary might say. Writing deadlines, Zoom calls, and bureaucratic tasks and unpaid care work that have nothing to do with music. Half the time, we’re playing roles in divisions of labor so far removed from the joy of making protest songs, it’s absurd. So yeah—we’re time-scarce. If we spent months mastering, mixing, fine-tuning everything to so-called perfection, we’d stop creating altogether. And that would kill what this project is about: the urgency of it. We’re trying to write, produce, and release two songs a month—songs that respond to the Trump regime, to global capitalism, to everything fucked about the new and the now. We’re not interested in perfection. We’re interested in presence. In a social practice. The songs are made in real time, with the world as it unfolds—tactical interventions, meditations, ruminations. They’re historical records of the moment they were created. Like tortured journal entries, but sonic. We care more about that than spending a year in mixing rituals for some imaginary label exec’s approval. We do the best we can with what we’ve got—but we don’t obsess. Our sound is a middle finger to the hyperreal world of Spotify-core polish, TikTok-filtered boredom, and algorithmic mediocrity. We live in a culture perfectly curated to death. You scroll past 500 lies before breakfast. Everything looks and sounds better than it is—and then reality feels like a letdown. You know the feeling: you binge stream your favorite artist all week, finally see them live… and it’s kinda meh. But you’re part of the disappointment too—filming the show through your phone, angling for a few likes after the event instead of actually being there. Listening. Dancing. Feeling. The moment becomes digital content. And somehow you kill the experience
Your lyrics read like manifestos, full of references to political theory, historical resistance, and radical philosophy. Who are your biggest intellectual influences?
Look—we stand on the shoulders of a whole damn history of resisters. Every thinker, every small group, every social movement, every party, anyone who looked at the brutality of the present and said, no—not like this. This is not the right. This is not the good. We can, we should, we must, do better. Our lyrics are fragments of a long, unfinished conversation with everyone who’s ever tried to understand the world in order to change it, and for the better. Our biggest intellectual influences? How long you got? Karl Marx, obviously—capitalism didn’t fall out of the sky, and it won’t last forever. That’s the first truth we hold tight. Then there’s Antonio Gramsci, helping us see how hegemony and power work—not just with tanks, but through the active consent. Rosa Luxemburg, reminding us it’s “socialism or barbarism.” W.E.B. Du Bois. Frantz Fanon. Angela Davis. Walter Rodney. Malcolm X. Judith Butler. bell hooks. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Silvia Federici. Stuart Hall. David Graeber. The Combahee River Collective. Donna Haraway. Mark Fisher. And Marx again, because honestly, you’re never done with him.
The reading list of our influences doesn’t stop with the big names. It’s also the squatters, the strikers, the mutual aid networks, the student occupiers, the Indigenous land defenders, the queer and trans comrades, the climate activists locking themselves to pipelines, the workers organizing under threat of losing everything. That’s our syllabus too. The Left—across all its messy, contradictory, beautiful tendencies: anarchist, socialist, communist, feminist, abolitionist, decolonial, queer—has always insisted on this one core idea: another world is possible. Not just possible—necessary. Debt Shop Boi stands on that side of history—self-reflexively, and consciously. We’re not saying the Left has every answer. Hell, the history of the Left is full of fuckups and failures, with only occasional, precious victories. But it’s a tradition that shaped us. One worth rebuilding, refining, continuing—into the future. We need to prepare the ground for a world after capitalism. The survival of humanity—and of countless other species—depends on it. We need to do better. We read the past not to canonize dead idols or fetishize theory bros, but to learn. These thinkers and organizers were complex, flawed, deeply human people dealing with their own moments of crisis. They didn’t know everything. They didn’t get it all right. But they tried. Debt Shop Boi sides with them—with the people building, or at least trying to build (and sometimes failing), something beyond this slow-death spiral of a system. The people refusing despair. The people demanding joy, dignity, and a life worth living—for everyone. Those are our influences.
So, I guess we’re the actual bogeyman—the “cultural Marxists”—that Project 2025 fears—not the liberals they lump us in with. From J. Edgar Hoover tapping phones and hunting Reds, to Joseph McCarthy waving empty folders on TV, to Ronald Reagan funding death squads while selling trickle-down dreams, to Donald Trump yelling “Marxism!” every time someone says public healthcare or school lunch programs should exist—we are exactly what these reactionaries fear: intellectuals, readers, writers, artists, agitators who believe capitalism will one day end, and that we have a responsibility to prepare for what comes next. So yeah, we are the “cultural Marxists” hated by conservatives. We’re insulted by their lazy conflation of people like us with Joe Biden or Rachel Maddow. The real Marxist Left lives in a totally different galaxy. We’re out there—on a pod or a busted starship—scouting the earth’s wreckage, taking notes, writing dispatches. Watching the evil empire decay in real time.
If Debt Shop Boi had to be described as a single political text—fiction or non-fiction—what would it be and why?
Oof. That’s a hard one. If we had to pick a single political text that captures the spirit of Debt Shop Boi—fiction or non-fiction—it’d probably be The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Why? Because it’s messy, hopeful, angry, utopian, disillusioned, and brutally honest—all at once. It’s not some naive blueprint for a perfect world. It’s a meditation on the tough work of building something better. The contradictions, the compromises, the alienation that creeps in even when you think you’ve escaped the worst of capitalism. It’s about exile and home, love and revolution, systems and sabotage. It’s about the long revolution, of trying to live otherwise in a world that wants you to conform, consume, and comply. That’s us. Like Shevek, we’re trying to smuggle ideas across borders—except ours are streaming songs instead of physics equations. We’re caught between the horror world of what is and the fragile dream of what could be. We know the future won’t be given to us—we have to try to make it, together, imperfectly but collectively. And yeah, we’ll get it wrong sometimes. Most of the time, perhaps. But we’ll still try, and try again. And in that trying, collectively, we can live a purposeful and meaningful life. So yeah. The Dispossessed.
Did you come from a musical family? What are some of your earliest musical memories?
Debt Shop Boi spins myths about its origin. One version starts in Brooklyn, where baristas and bike couriers dreamed of being the next LCD Soundsystem before the rent got too high and the scene got too bleak. Another begins in a co-op near Kensington Market, where grad students read Empire and Multitude by day and made distorted electro-noise by night. Another traces us to the Midwest—giving Woody Guthrie a keyboard with a sticker that says, “these buttons kill fascists.” There’s even a Berlin version, where we were a Die Krupps cover band that woke up mid-set and declared war on tech feudalism. But if we were telling you the real story—not the myths, but the living lineage—it’d sound more like this: Debt Shop Boi comes from working-class backgrounds. Divorced parents. No silver spoons. No industry connections. No art school pipeline. Nobody in the family was “in music” professionally. But music was around. Mom playing Tears for Fears on the radio. Dad with an acoustic guitar at bonfires. Three years of piano lessons at a neighbor’s house (ages 9–12)—the kind where you learn “Für Elise” and dream about quitting. After that? Pure self-teaching. No YouTube tutorials. Music class cut from high school. At 13, one of us washed dishes at a Greek restaurant to buy a mic. Then a toy Casio keyboard from K-Mart. Then a Peavey amp and beat-up bass. Then a cassette eight-track TASCAM-488 from Steve’s Music. A drum machine. A trash kit passed down by a friend. We played to 90s industrial and grunge and wrote discordant electronic songs—soundtracks to imagined dystopias, video game plots, sci-fi movie moods, heartbreak, cafeteria alienation. We sang in musicals. In the later years of high school, some of us played in a punk/hardcore/emo band called Dystopia—rehearsing in a farmhouse or an attic. Then came the university years for some, like twelve of those. Then precariat years. More bands. Solo projects. Collective experiments. Political communities. Sometimes the music stopped—for years. Writing, reading, organizing, day jobs took over. But music always came back. When other forms of political expression felt sterile, boxed-in, or performative, music was the thing that felt true and real. Debt Shop Boi isn’t just a band. It’s performance art. It’s personas, subject-positions, working-class identities, and aesthetic and experience thrown into a digital blender. Bowie taught us about the power of personas and performances through music. He was a constellation of personas—each one crafted to reflect, refract, or resist the society and culture around him. Debt Shop Boi learned from that. Each song is voiced by a character in Debt Shop Boi’s world: an under-employed creative precariat, a burnt-out adjunct, a young DSA canvasser, a white-collar knowledge worker. Others as well. We channel them. We embody them. Not as gimmicks, but as acts of understanding—as a way of mapping life under capitalism. So no—we didn’t come from a “musical family” in the classic sense. But we came from somewhere real. Somewhere a lot of people come from.
Your track “We’ve Never Been Woke” takes direct aim at performative progressivism. Do you think mainstream artists claiming ‘wokeness’ are helping or harming the cause?
On first listen, “We’ve Never Been Woke” is an anthem for the betrayal of every emancipatory ideal that got run through the spin cycle of the cultural industry until it came out as a brand partnership with Pepsi. The track is us saying: we see it. We see how anti-racism, queer liberation, feminism, climate justice, decolonization—all of it—got flattened into slogans, hashtags, and marketing decks. We watched Google and Meta and Amazon slap rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter hashtags on their platforms while enjoying procurement contracts with the security state and union busting. If we’re talking about artists speaking truth to power from below, using their platform to redirect attention and solidarity toward movements for social transformation on the ground—then cool. Necessary. Respect. But if we’re talking about performative wokeness—the kind that exists only to sell merch or do damage control for an artist’s reputation while cozying up to an apartheid state or the oil and gas tycoons—then yeah, that’s bullshit. We wrote “We’ve Never Been Woke” as a critique of this co-optation. Mainstream artists who lean into “wokeness” without actually standing for anything or saying anything risk helping the system seem progressive while it remains anything but. That’s why we say: we’ve never been woke.
But that’s not the most important point of the song. You may hear “We’ve Never Been Woke” and think it’s just another left critique of how corporations co-opt symbols of dissent. But the real target of the song is the bullshit propaganda campaign coming from the political Right—the Fox News crowd, the oil-and-gas billionaire think tanks, the Christian fundamentalist lobbyists, and the millionaire influencer bros like Jordan Peterson—who are selling this absurd fantasy that America has become “too woke” or that “woke people” constitute the society’s ruling class. The Right is peddling this delusional idea that just because a few corporations hired liberal DEI consultants or because Target sold a rainbow onesie, that somehow the country is under siege by some kind of massive Left preaching “cultural Marxism.” It’s pure ideological misdirection. A smokescreen. And it’s working.
“We’ve Never Been Woke” is saying: let’s get real—America didn’t start as a land of human emancipation, and it hasn’t become one either. Yes, in the 21st century, we’ve had moments of mass resistance—Occupy, Black Lives Matter, women’s marches, climate strikes—but those weren’t signs that America had become too woke. They were signs that people are still trying to wake up. And what did the Trump-Musk state and the ruling class do in response? They cracked down. They cut the funding. They censored the words. They purged “wokeness” from school curricula, banned history books, and forced many organizations to walk back even their shallowest gestures of progressive reform. DEI programs and sustainability pledges? Most of that has been axed. So yeah—the Right’s narrative that “wokeness is out of control” is not just false—it’s strategic propaganda. It’s designed to obscure who actually holds power in this country. Spoiler: it’s not a bunch of Marxist graduate students. It’s Elon Musk. It’s Wall Street bankers. It’s CEOs taking 350 times the median worker’s annual salary. It’s the Heritage Foundation. It’s Wall Street. It’s the fossil fuel lobby. It’s the billionaires funding these culture wars while quietly getting richer than ever.
There’s a massive difference between occupying positions of power in a capitalist system and speaking truth to that power. And right now, there is no anti-capitalist, socialist, intersectional working-class Left holding structural power in the U.S.—or in most of the world, frankly. Not anywhere. No organization or institution—in the state, in the corporate sector, or in the NGO universe—is dominated by actual Marxists. That’s just the truth. And yet these billionaire-backed anti-woke outrage merchants keep spinning moral panic out of thin air, selling lies to millions of working-class people, distracting them from the actual economic and political forces crushing their lives. “We’ve Never Been Woke” is our way of calling that lie out. The U.S. isn’t too woke. It’s too unequal, too unfree, too violent. The people peddling the “wokeism gone wild” narrative are part of the problem—ideological grifters propping up the very system they pretend to critique. We’re not falling for it. And we’re making sure others don’t either.
Many of your songs critique the gig economy, late-stage capitalism, and tech feudalism. What’s your own relationship to labor outside of music?
We’ve lived waged labor, clocked it, been it. Between us, we’ve washed dishes, cooked lines, served tables, poured drinks, stocked shelves, rung up rentals at Blockbuster, managed shifts at barely surviving franchises, mowed lawns in the summer heat, and coordinated chaotic kids’ camps for barely-above-minimum-wage. We’ve done the grind in hospitality, retail, education, and more. And we climbed our way into the university system—thanks to grants, part-time jobs, and pure determination to pay the rent. Some got degrees. Some became research assistants, adjunct profs, and contract instructors—carrying all the precarious academic-institutional baggage that comes with that. Some went further. It’s supposed to feel like “making it,” but you look around and realize: the conditions haven’t improved. They’ve worsened. Higher education is being defunded and put into competition with EdTech firms. The labor’s still undervalued. The precarity, even for those who’ve spent ten years earning a PhD, is still brutally real. Everyone’s read the story of the adjunct teaching eight classes on the labor theory of value and driving for Uber just to survive.
Meanwhile, right-wing education reformers are trying to automate the whole thing with AI. They want to eliminate labor altogether, free universities from the responsibility of paying people, and shift more and more work onto underpaid staff—and onto students, who are told they should be “grateful” just to accumulate debt chasing degrees that no longer guarantee a future career. Still, some of us made our way. Higher education gave us something. Some of us never left the system. And here’s the kicker: we know we’re the exception, not the rule. Upward mobility through university was once a pathway for the working class—now it’s an obstacle course. Some of us were lucky. Nowadays, even kids from upper-middle-class homes with professional parents and “good schools” are graduating deeper in debt, landing fewer good jobs, and falling into precarity faster than ever. So when we write songs about late-stage capitalism, the gig economy, and precarious work and labour, we’re not doing it from a distance—we’ve been in it. We still are, sometimes.
Growing up working class makes you resilient but also makes you feel existentially precarious forever, no matter how many degrees you earn, awards you win, or performance reviews you ace. We’ve worked for tips, for exposure, for hope. We’ve been hired and fired, laid off, underpaid, over-paid, under-utilized, overworked, rejected and celebrated by employers, surveilled and ignored, and so much more. We’ve earned less than minimum wage and more than average salaries. We’ve worked part-time and full-time. We’ve experienced absolute degradation and incredible self-actualization. No matter what, we’re still anxious. And we know—we’re not alone. Our music is the theory of life and labor in capitalism you can dance to. Debt Shop Boi is many personas channeling a multitude of voices that wants to speak to everyone, or at least the majority: the working class, in all its messiness and contradiction.
You’ve described this project as a protest spanning the duration of Trump’s presidency. We admire your determination. How has the project been going now that we’re a couple months in?
Ah, thank you. Yeah—this is probably the most meaningful creative political thing we’ve done in a long time. Maybe ever. And that’s saying something. We’ve spent years in Left political spaces. We’ve marched against wars. We’ve been part of democratic socialist organizations. We’ve directly confronted the white nationalist or alt-right, online and off. We’ve read a lot. Written a lot. Co-organized community events. Given talks. All that work taught us so much—it shaped our entire intellectual and political being. And it still matters. But we hit a wall. A deep, crushing wall of despair—especially after Trump’s re-election in 2024. Like, what the fuck are we even doing anymore? What is the Left? Where is it? The return of Trump, the intensifying U.S.-China inter-imperial rivalry with its nuclear shadow, the worsening global climate crisis, the fascist creep (or sprint) across much of the world, the rollback of public goods and basic rights liberals once assumed were untouchable… it was too much. And Leftist activist spaces? Burning out precisely at the time when we need them to go atomic. After that Trump win, we felt politically useless. Like walking piles of unread Verso books and half-baked strategy memos for a spectral political party that never quite forms. So we did something we hadn’t done in a long time: we returned to making music. Debt Shop Boi was born out of despair and depression. Out of fear. Out of reflection at the scale of the defeat its tradition has faced. Out of the impasse. Out of the recognition that while the New Left theory and model of political practice shaped us deeply, it’s just not enough—not for this moment. Not for this scale of catastrophe. We needed to make something. Anything. To tap back into what gave us hope when we were younger—when music felt like an adrenaline shot, when the world still seemed wide open, when we actually believed we could win. So we started manically writing lyrics based on stuff we’re reading and releasing songs. We aim for at least two a month, if we can keep it up, and we can sustain morale. If the world doesn’t end. If full-blown fascism doesn’t emerge, and censor, jail or kill us. Protest tracks. Ruthless criticisms of everything. Each track a dispatch. A memory bank. A tiny sonic tactic of dissent. We want people to listen and to feel less alone—but if no one does? That’s okay. It’s the doing that matters. It’s the doing that keeps us from giving up or giving in or dropping out.
A lot of electronic artists embrace futurism, but your music feels like it’s warning us about a future that’s already arrived. How do you see the role of technology in resistance…and in music?
Up with digital technology! And down with it too! The technological knife cuts both ways. Sometimes we stare at our laptops like they’re the most powerful means of proletarian creativity. Other times, we know they’re surveillance machines—tracking everything we do, say and click, and monetizing everyone’s data. Backdoor to national security state as well. In this world, everyone’s a “creator,” but almost no one gets paid. We know that too. Let’s be real: Big Tech platforms—they’re not our best friends. Spotify pays fractions of pennies to artists while padding billionaires’ portfolios. We know this. We’ve read the reports. And yet—here we are. Every lyric we write, every vocal we track, every mix, master, and upload—it all happens on laptops and second-hand gear. We are making music with mostly low-cost digital hardware and software, releasing it through digital streaming platforms. We didn’t grow up with this. Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, you needed hardware. You needed an amp from a pawn shop, a shitty drum kit passed down by a kid who quit the band to play baseball, a guitar bought after months of washing dishes. The means of production were heavy. You needed cars to drive stuff around. Analog. Often out of reach. Now? The means of music production live inside your device. That’s not salvation—but it’s something. We’re not saying digital tech saves us. No way. But it’s reshaped the conditions of music-making. It’s given people like us—musical nobodies, amateurs, agitators—a way to create and put our music out in the world without waiting for permission or spending a lot of money. No label. No venue. No radio station. No MTV.
Even still—our music might sound like a warning, because we’re living in the techno-dystopian world future science fiction told us to fear. Corporate tech monopolies. Autocratic surveillance states. Social media psychosis. But we’re also in that system—and our use of its digital tools doesn’t mean surrender. We know we’re being dominated and exploited by the platform giants, but in some ways, we’re also using these means to augment our creative labor, to accelerate our production and amplify our presence. We’re using the master’s tools to create songs that won’t topple the master—but maybe, just maybe, they’ll add to the chorus of those who are trying and offer something to dance to along the way. There is no “outside” to the platforms—not yet. We’re stuck with the infrastructure the tech titans built, even as we dream about tearing it down and remaking it for something better. Until then? We use what we’ve got. Knowing full well that the data, the clicks, the streams—it’s feeding the machine. But maybe our songs are a form of immanent critique. We’re not tech utopians. But we’re not tech dystopians either, even though we fully respect the neo-Luddites resisting the digital machines made to deskill and automate their labor. There’s a tension here—a contradiction—and that’s where we live. That’s where the songs come from. It’s baked into the means of production and distribution. It’s in the container and content. Debt Shop Boi makes music inside the digital monster it wants to slay. And we’re going to keep doing it. Until the system crashes. Or something better is built.
Your aesthetic pulls from electroclash, industrial, and synthwave, yet your lyrics feel rooted in punk and folk traditions. Do you consider Debt Shop Boi a punk band at heart?
Are we a punk band at heart? Yeah. And—no. We’re punk. And we’re folk. We’re both. We’re neither. Maybe we’re something in between that hasn’t been named yet. Strip it all down—past the drum machines, the synths, the vocal filters—and what we’re making is music that tells the truth about the world. From the viewpoint of those getting crushed by it—and those refusing to be crushed. That’s punk. That’s folk. That’s working-class music. It’s not reducible to a specific style or a sound. It’s an attitude. But let’s be real: “punk” these days? It’s often just a standard fashion, not an innovation. Dick Hebdige warned us about this back in Subculture. A lot—not all, but a lot—of what presents as punk now is subcultural stylistic imitation, not a living, breathing, thinking, feeling, resisting subculture. Ripped jeans made in factories. $200 “distressed” jackets sold in boutique stores on the gentrified Lower East Side. Safety pins stitched into H&M fast fashion. Mohawks were once a big subversion to school dress codes and corporate office apparel—now they’re everywhere in Netflix teen dramas and advertisements for brands. The whole style has been commercialized and turned into a costume: tartan pants, combat boots, anarchist logos. We’re not mad at the style, nor the people that wear it—we wore it too, coming up. We get it. But when punk becomes just a style guide, with no politics underneath? It’s hollow. I feel more radical in my ugly sweatpants and hoodie, sitting in a hipster coffee shop surrounded by people who look like punks—but are probably bitcoin entrepreneurs.
We don’t care about style. About dressing the part. About posing as punk. We’re inspired by the attitude—the analysis. By The Clash. Crass. Dead Kennedys. By the Riot Grrrl scene. Team Dresch. Bikini Kill. By Fugazi and Propagandhi. Those bands showed us that punk was never just a sound or a jacket. It was vision. It was refusal. It was critique. We don’t sound like them. But we’re with them. In spirit. In politics. In a position. That’s punk.
But we’re also pulling from the American folk traditions of the Popular Front. We owe a deep debt to the music of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and Phil Ochs—and to all the anonymous hands that strummed union songs into being, not just in strike camps, but in picket lines, protest marches, jail cells, coal towns, freedom schools, and farm fields. Yeah, we’ve got synths instead of banjos, drum loops instead of feat stomping, and algorithmically generated basslines instead of harmonicas. But if you define folk by function—music made for the underdog, about their struggles, their triumphs, and their defeats in the face of injustice and adversity—then that’s what we are. The historical moment and instruments are different, but the impulse is the same: tell the truth about capitalist exploitation and validate the conditions and experiences of society’s working-class majority. Our inspirations aren’t just Suicide and Skinny Puppy—they’re also Gil Scott-Heron and Nina Simone, and the workers who sang songs together with busted voices and no record deals. The best of punk and folk are radical cousins anyway—both built on telling the truth, speaking truth to the powers that be, in a popular vernacular. So are we punk? Yeah. Are we folk? Definitely. Are we synth-pop-proletariat-core? Maybe. Are we doomwave? Sometimes. Call the sound whatever you want. We’re not precious about genre. We’re serious about the message and the movement.
Are there any live performances in your future, or is Debt Shop Boi exclusively a studio project?
Some of us played live before, but not in years. We don’t know Debt Shop Boi we ever will perform a live show. Maybe we’ll join the ranks of The Residents, Boards of Canada, or early Postal Service—just a quiet studio project, collaborating and releasing songs, infrequently stepping on a stage. We honestly don’t know. Maybe no stage is required. For now, the internet is our stage. Streaming platforms are our venue. Maybe one day we’ll do a live YouTube, Instagram or Facebook set, or some other virtual set. Or maybe not. For now, it’s about the lyrics and the songs. But maybe one day, we’ll throw a party—invite comrades, fellow travelers and friends to dance with us, or at least one of us.
Thank you so much for spending some time with us today. Where can people go to find out more about you and your music?
Thank you. Great questions. If folks want to find out more about what Debt Shop Boi is doing, hear the latest tracks (we’ll drop at least one or two every month for the next four years), here’s where to go:
Spotify
Apple Music
Bluesky
Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
X
