AJJ Announce New Album Dirty Old Power, Share “Beauty and Truth 2”
- BabyStep Magazine
- 9 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Arizona punk veterans AJJ have announced their ninth studio album, Dirty Old Power, arriving 25 September via AJJ Unlimited Ltd and Specialist Subject. Alongside the news, the band have shared “Beauty and Truth 2”, a furious, mournful new single that takes aim at the collapse of shared reality and the idea of objective truth.
Following the scorched-earth energy of lead single “Phlamethrower”, “Beauty and Truth 2” takes a more reflective route. Frontman Sean Bonnette frames the track as a song of “mourning and rage” over a world where truth itself feels increasingly unstable, while still clinging to the possibility that human connection can survive the noise.
That tension sits at the heart of Dirty Old Power. Across 12 tracks, AJJ confront a rapidly mutating world of AI, algorithmic culture, concentrated wealth and technological alienation, questioning whether the language humans have relied on to understand each other still works.
“A lot of Dirty Old Power is about how our language is failing us and how we need a new human mode of expression,” Bonnette explains, arguing that humans need to develop a new code in response to machines increasingly capable of producing language and culture.
Musically, the album continues AJJ’s long-running refusal to stay in one lane. Folk-punk foundations collide with country, glam, black metal, minimalism and rock, with tracks ranging from the cowboy lament of “Update” to the classical-meets-extreme-metal collision of “Hungry House”. “Window in Yr Mind” nods towards the band’s love of ’70s glam, while “No Home in This World” offers a gentler counterpoint to the record’s heavier moments.
Recorded at Animal Rites studio in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton, who previously worked with AJJ on Christmas Island and The Bible 2, the album also features artwork by legendary Dead Kennedys visual collaborator Winston Smith.
Rather than attempting to make sense of an increasingly surreal world, Dirty Old Power sounds like AJJ embracing the chaos — and using punk’s oldest weapons of all: noise, imagination, anger and a stubborn belief in human expression.
Dirty Old Power is out 25 September 2026.
AJJ will tour the UK and Ireland in March 2027, including shows in Belfast, Dublin, Brighton, Cardiff, Bristol, London, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
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