Straw Man Army

Formed in 2018, this politically motivated, historically literate Brooklyn, New York punk duo creates propulsive, wordy, and concise guitar-based pieces that challenge the status quo and ask difficult questions concerning Western civilization's past, present, and future. While '70s first wave acts such as Wire and Buzzcocks are sonic touchpoints for Straw Man Army, the D.I.Y. moral anarcho-punk pathway pioneered by Crass is also a deep influence on the pair. Owen Deutsch and Sean Fentress first met at their Chicago high school, leading to them learning and playing cover versions in their parents' basements. Later, Deutsch was asked to join the Brooklyn hardcore act Kaleidoscope on drums and made a permanent move to New York City. Such was their bond that Fentress soon followed, in plenty of time to engineer and produce Kaleidoscope's first album proper, After the Futures…, at D4MT Labs in mid- to late 2018. With encouragement from their new friends on the Brooklyn political punk scene, Deutsch and Fentress formalized their own act, naming it Straw Man Army that same year. In 2019, also at D4MT Labs -- headquarters in all but name for the blossoming scene -- the pair set to work on their debut LP. While Deutsch had the drums covered, both played guitar and sang, and additional instrumentation was provided by Kaleidoscope's Shiva Addanki. The album was in the can by the beginning of 2020, despite Deutsch and Addanki's involvement in yet another project, Tower 7. On its October 2020 release, critics lauded the direct, uncompromising nature of Age of Exile. It explored the U.S.'s colonial past in strident fashion, with Deutsch and Fentress occasionally interspersing their didactic approach with exploratory, post-punk-inspired instrumental passages. All profits from the album were donated to the Native American advocacy organization Red Nation. Straw Man Army's next project was something of a sidestep. July 2021's Her Majesty's Ship was a wholly instrumental album, pieced together in collage form using samples, to venture further into post-punk, toward the avant-garde and ambient electronic music. It was billed as a soundtrack to an imagined experimental film based on Charles Darwin's 1839 book of journal writings The Voyage of the Beagle. True to form, all proceeds were donated to Roots Unbound N.Y.C., an arrangement that remained in place for subsequent Straw Man Army albums. If Age of Exile and Her Majesty's Ship delved into the past, the source material for Straw Man Army's next vocal LP, 2022's SOS, was the world's state of affairs contemporaneous to the time of its release. Thematically, it focused on anxieties caused both by technological advancement and the Western world's approach to battling COVID-19. Although the tone remained urgent and angry, the duo once again added texture, with titular ambient instrumental tracks contributing to the record's overall flow. In November 2024, completing a trilogy begun with Age of Exile and SOS, the band released Earthworks, turning their attention to challenges likely to be faced by mankind in the future. ~ TiVo Staff, Rovi