Soul Glo Diaspora Problems LP (White Vinyl)

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Late December 2020 found Soul Glo holed away in an unfinished warehouse, beginning to find drum tones for their upcoming full length, Diaspora Problems. They had just begun to accept that they would be in talks with Epitaph Records, and that it was likely they were going to go with the label as they hadn't even begun to reach a place where they could consider shopping it to other record labels. Working with Epitaph was far and away the best case scenario that the band could've hoped for, but they simultaneously wondered if the label had any understanding of what they were getting into.

From 2016 to 2021, Soul Glo conceptualized and produced Diaspora Problems nearly completely alone. The demo and tracking process was handled exclusively by the band's bassist GG and engineer/close friend Evan Bernard. The final tracks were recorded in that same unfinished warehouse and the band's practice space during the hottest parts of summer 2021.

Thematically, Diaspora Problems is a simple analysis of where Soul Glo currently finds themselves: poised to leap into their future, for better or worse, with nothing but their life experience and lessons learned to communicate, and only each other to rely on. Lyrically, the album deals with analyses of the music industry as it exists through the eyes of people who are experiencing it for the first time. Aside from that, the concepts explored include an artist and individuals' self-doubt and self-hate, past traumas that can only be worked out in adulthood, financial instability and how it affects an artist, the effects of institutional and state violence, and the power of community that delivered Soul Glo through each struggle the band has endured from their inception and before.

Diaspora Problems is only the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a bright future for Soul Glo, as well as a forecast for what the band is capable of musically. Hardcore punk is at the precipice of a sonic revolution as a higher variance of people find room for themselves and the expression of their lived experience within the genre. More and more people will be injecting a cultural identity and offering a narrative previously unheard and/or underappreciated by punk rockers and kindred spirits the world over. Diaspora Problems is not aiming to be the only album like it that exists, but instead one of many entries in a new dawn for rock music.

Diaspora Problems feels celebratory, not grim: a scream of pain that testifies, above everything else, to an ironclad will to live.

The riffs are fast and furious while the lyrics are funny and incisive. Beautiful, Black punk rock for our folks.

The rage contained within the 12 songs on Diaspora Problems is potent enough to launch anyone clinging to the status quo or softening of aggressive music out of an airlock into space to make way for a better tomorrow. Soul Glo have caused a clearing in the forest with an album so boundless in its creativity that it cannot be ignored. This is the shape of hardcore that we had been promised.

Hurtling downhill at a breakneck pace while playing an often chaotic mix of punk rock, post-hardcore, ska, hip-hop, and metal, Soul Glo swing for the fences. There's nothing subtle about the album — just hold on tight and try to keep up.

It's a great punk record, a great rap record, and a great rock record. It's innovative, honest, purposeful, and as catchy as it is abrasive. And it's a record that really makes you feel something, from the moment that first snare hit strikes you like a bolt of lightning to the album's horn-fueled fade-out.

If you want your ears kicked, Soul Glo can do that like few others, but Diaspora Problems confirms that's hardly the beginning and end of their talents.

This could be morose, heady stuff, but Soul Glo makes it feel like a lively bar debate, a series of short blasts of no-nonsense invective delivered colorfully in the way that some of the best punk rock in history has transmuted political science into everyman rage.