Legendary Punk Band Propagandhi’s Fight to Be At Peace

At Peace is Propagandhi’s eighth full-length, and their first in eight years, after 2017’s Victory Lap. It features some of their more experimental compositions, like the aforementioned opener, and the prog-metal ballad “Stargazing,” which is one of the gentlest songs in Propagandhi’s almost 40 years together. There’s the slowed-down hard rock of “No Longer Young,” and the sort of late-career downtempo metal of “Benito’s Earlier Work” and “Day By Day.” There are doses of skate-punk, thrash, and melodic hardcore here, too, but At Peace certainly marks a new speed for Propagandhi.

“We almost pushed ourselves in the opposite direction that we usually push ourselves,” says Hannah. “We’re usually looking for ‘frantic and dense, out of control.’ This record, we thought, ‘We’re going to push ourselves in the opposite direction, out of our comfort zone, into under-control, lots of space, room for things to bloom.’ For us, that meant slowing down.”

“I was working on just being able to play simple, mechanical things at much slower speeds. I realized when I did it for a long time, and I got okay at it, when I sped it up, it was so much better.”

The tempos of some of the songs on At Peace were uncomfortably slow. For decades, Propagandhi has been a band that either plays fast or really fast, and Hannah simply didn’t know how to play riffs at much less than breakneck speed. Judas Priest’s 2018 record Firepower was an energetic inspiration for the new approach. “There’s an essence to that record that I think we were all hoping to evoke in writing these songs,” says Hannah. “It’s not an aesthetic thing, like we don’t have any of the ornamentation or performance capabilities of the guys in Judas Priest, but we wanted to honor something that we heard in that record, and I think that drove us to dial things back a bit and open it up. It harkens back to the music we first were inspired by in the ’80s, like the thrash-metal scene. The sense that you are being vaulted into outer space by the performance of the band was really important to us, but those bands also were able to control things.”