Today, folk-punk legends AJJ have announced that they will be releasing their 8th studio album, Disposable Everything, on May 26th via Hopeless Records. It is their first since 2020’s Good Luck Everybody, and their first for Hopeless Records.

To go along with the album announcement, AJJ have shared two new singles, the albums title-track and “Dissonance. ” These two songs follow the recently released “The Baby Panda,” with “Disposable Everything” spelling out the damaging impact of late capitalism while still shimmering with hope. AJJ’s Sean Bonnette says “This video came together really naturally. My oldest friend is a master puppeteer by the name of Gwendolyn Bonar. We went to kindergarten together. I reached out to her at the beginning of December to gauge her interest in working with us on a video, to which she replied ‘Yeah, let’s get weird.’ So I called Joe Stakun, director of AJJ’s classic video ‘Goodbye Oh Goodbye’ and in less than a month we were shooting the video at the Great Arizona Puppet Theater.”

The puppets used in the film are all made of trash and found materials, and coincidentally, so were the lenses that (director of photography) Eric Bader used in the shoot. Turns out his pandemic project was making camera lenses from broken camera equipment, found glass, and pipe fittings. As soon as he heard the song he knew what he had been building them for.

Recorded in 2022 in various studios across the Southwest with the band recording as a five-piece for the first time, Disposable Everything boasts apocalyptic themes and imagery like all the best AJJ records. But while it follows the outbreak of a pandemic and AJJ’s eerily prescient Good Luck Everybody, the new album is less a prophesying mirror held to a burning world than one inspired by personal grief and about what happens when you reach the other side. In fact, it’s a vital, important and beautiful album that’ll make you feel better about everything while telling you just how terrible everything is at the same time.

For AJJ, Disposable Everything is about what happens after the collapse—on both an intimately personal level and a much broader scale. “A large part of this album is the terrible thing I’ve been imagining finally happened,” Bonnette explains. “A big theme is my mom’s death, which is something I think everyone lives in terror of. But once it happens and you’re still alive, you figure out how to move on. It is, in some weird way, our happiest record.”

Artwork:

AJJ

Track-listing:

  1. Strawberry (Probably)
  2. Dissonance
  3. Moon Valley High
  4. Death Machine
  5. White Ghosts
  6. Disposable Everything
  7. Sean
  8. The Baby Panda
  9. A Thought of You
  10. Candles of Love
  11. I Hate Rock and Roll Again
  12. Schadenfreude
  13. I Wanna Be Your Dog 2
  14. All of My Woulds
  15. In the Valley