Propagandhi At Peace And Set To Rock Australia…

Propagandhi will make their long-awaited return to Australia and Aotearoa in early 2027 for their first tour in the region in nearly eight years, armed with an incendiary live show and a catalogue of songs that continue to challenge, confront and inspire. The ever evolving standard bearers of politically charged punk have actively kicked against musical confines and bro-punk conservatism, promoting a message of anti-fascism since 1986. Distilling their DNA of breakneck riffs, hardcore ethos, and radical consciousness, their message remains as vital, and volatile, as ever. The tour comes in support of the Manitoba, Canada-based outfit’s eighth album, At Peace. In true Propagandhi fashion, it’s smart music for dangerous times. Guitarist Chris Hannah talks to Rob Lyon about returning to Australia for their headline tour and Froth & Fury in Adelaide.

It’s really exciting Propagandhi coming back to Australia. Eight years, just in the whole context of what’s happening in the world it feels like a really long time?
Yeah, I don’t actually somehow remember the last tour down there. I don’t know if the last eight years have just reset my brain or something, but it’s funny, because the 90s tours are so ingrained in my memory and… was it 2019 we came down there? I don’t have any… fuck, I’m just lost. I don’t remember anything anymore.

I guess it’s a great opportunity to create new memories.
For sure.

And here in Adelaide, playing Froth & Fury, which is becoming one of Australia’s premier metal and rock festival, that’s got to be a nice little score for the band?
I saw the line-up… we’re probably a little the odd band out on that, it looks like from an aesthetic standpoint. But I looked at the line-up, oh cool, Dark Angel, fucking Death Angel, bands I grew up on and never got to see, so I’m kind of stoked for that.

As time goes past, do you get worried the opportunity to come back might not present itself quite the same? Were you always confident there’d be another tour?
Well, I’m not really a road warrior, per se, so I don’t think about that myself too much. But I guess I probably should, it is quite an opportunity to get to go halfway across the world. Fucking Australia. But yeah, I guess at this age, now that you mention it, just the other day me and Jord were talking about, like… one of us dropping at some point. What do we do when one guy dies? Those thoughts had never really occurred to us in the past forty years, and now we’re talking about it because we’re at that age where we have friends our age who are really fucking dying. So… yeah, there’s a dark thought for you.

For the Australian tour, is the approach any different, whether it’s Froth & Fury or your own show? Are you leaning toward any particular album on this run?
We’re not really… I think it’ll be a similar set. We don’t really adjust our set for festivals because we’re not really much of a festival band. We definitely do better in a small club scenario, it feels more familiar. It’s where we came up, it’s where the music developed. That big outdoor festival thing where there’s a giant barrier between the band and the crowd is a little foreign to us. But set‑wise, we’re going to do the same thing. It’ll lean mostly on the most recent record, At Peace. We always try to hand‑pick a few things from the older records that still feel somehow relevant. A lot of the older stuff… I don’t think we could bring ourselves to play a lot of it, just because it would feel so hokey. There are a few songs on the older records that maintain a message that has run through the band the whole time, so we’re okay with a few of them and it seems to satisfy the people who want some older stuff too.

Is that partly because you’ve all moved on and progressed, that some of those older songs just don’t fit where the band is now? Is that the thought process there?
Yeah, a bit of that. I don’t think we’re mortified by the ideas we were trying to get at on the old records, it’s more just the way we said them. Songs… essentially Propagandhi songs are diary entries. It can be mortifying enough to put out a recent, accurate diary entry, but if you had to go back and publicly release some poem you wrote in high school, you’d be like, Jesus Christ, please don’t do this to me. But ours are out there for everybody to listen to, and we don’t necessarily want to… it has to feel like the song has to have some kernel of truth in it still for us to be able to trot it out on stage at this point.

Talking about At Peace, it’s a fantastic album. Was there a particular moment or event that helped shape the direction of that record?
I think everything we do is a composite of events and experiences and people, all distilled down into these songs. I would say we recorded the record as the Gaza genocide was… I mean, it’s still unfolding, but culturally it was at an apex of people paying attention to it. That was challenging for everybody who was paying attention, a challenging thing to witness, to bear witness to, and to feel so hopeless about. That did affect the way the record turned out. There’s a darkness and a dreariness to the record. Some of that was sonic choices we made, but it was also the mood at the time.

Is it a tough balance trying to maintain that intensity and ferocity with the lyrical messaging as well?
I mean… it’s a struggle. We’re not natural songwriters, we’re not natural musicians, everything we do is just this… we persevere to make a song. Everything’s a struggle, no matter what. So the answer is yes, but not necessarily for the reasons you might be wondering. It’s more generalised, we have great difficulty. That’s why records of ours come out every fucking seven years or something. There are huge gaps between the records we make because it takes us… it is such a struggle to put music together that sounds coherent and intelligible and interesting, and then on top of that fit in these words. It’s so hard. We find it so hard. But at the end of it all, at the end of that process, we also find the process rewarding. So we continue to do it.

What drives the progression for your band? Is it curiosity, challenge, necessity, all of the above?
Probably a little bit of all those. I was just saying to somebody that I simply can’t help myself as far as needing… I have a deep‑seated, uncontrollable need to tell the world what I think of it, whether it’s positive or negative. I cannot not do that and the band context that we discovered as teenagers has permitted that, and allowed me to elaborate on those ideas and follow a story arc of my life as I become a cynical old man. The whole way. So it’s kind of an interesting process.

Something that has to be celebrated is that as a band, it’s over three decades, a pretty significant accomplishment. Is there any sort of secret you could bottle up and pass on to younger bands to inspire them to keep going as long as you have?
Wow, man… yeah. Again, I was just talking about this with somebody else. There was a time before 1993, when we put that first record out, where the band was completely carefree. It really felt like just us, we can do whatever we want, we’re just doing this creative thing, making songs in a basement and trying to piss people off in the local punk scene. It was very carefree and interesting and fun. Once we put out the first record, that changed. There were all these eyes and ears on the band, and we had to put a lot more thought into what we did. In a lot of ways that’s been awesome, because the records we’ve put out, especially in the past twenty years, we really feel like we’ve impressed ourselves by how much work and planning we’ve put into them, and that other people found value in them. I do miss that time before we took the band seriously, and I think bands should hold on to that time where they’re not making songs thinking about other people observing them or hearing them.

It’s a gift to be taken seriously, but you have to pay a price. You lose something in that process and to this day, I don’t really like going on tour, I’m not a big fan of playing live. I love being in the practice space, because that imitates that lost era, it’s just us, no one’s listening, no one’s weighing in. For me, that’s the purest form of being in a band. I don’t know if that helps anybody, but it’s something to keep in mind for young people: you don’t want to let go of that too soon.

With that in mind, especially at this point in your careers, do you get nostalgic? Or is it very much about moving forward, the next album, the next tour?
I don’t think anyone in the band is very nostalgic. We don’t… I know other people, different segments of the general public, have ideas about what our golden era was, what our best era was, based on which record they like the best. For some people it’s the first record, that’s pretty typical for a lot of bands. We never, in the band, have ever looked back and thought, man, we were fucking cooking in 2009, too bad we can’t get back there. We never think that. We just think the next one’s going to be better. We have more experience, we know which mistakes not to make because we’ve made them all already. That’s why we’re still around.

Also because we’re genuinely friends. We started the band like that, me and Jord. He didn’t pick me because I was a great guitar player. I thought he was a great drummer, but we were just like, hey, we’re friends, let’s do a band. Eventually when we needed a bass player in 1997, we didn’t go find the best bass player, we picked our friend Todd, who’d never played bass before. Because that’s how you build something that lasts. You find your kindred spirits and then you can just keep going until one of you dies.

From the band perspective, is there anything left creatively that you really want to pursue?
A: No. No, no. I think… and I don’t mean that in a cynical or “I’ve done it all” way. We’ve never had a plan. We’ve never had ambition. We just do these things and see what happens. That’s what we’ll do next, we’ll do something and see what happens. I think we still have at least one more killer record in us before we have to go to the old folks’ home.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Propagandhi on the following dates, tickets HERE…

Also in Adelaide at Froth & Fury, tickets HERE…