Like every Lawrence Arms album since 2000-including their last full-length release, 2006’s much-acclaimed Oh! Calcutta!-Metropole was recorded at Chicago’s Atlas Studios with co-producer Matt Allison (an engineer also known for his work with fellow Chicago-punk-scene vets Alkaline Trio). “It’s like all that time off ended up creating a whole new energy for us.” “When we got going on making the album it felt like we were writing at a different and sort of evolved level, which was really exciting,” notes vocalist/guitarist Chris McCaughan, who formed the Lawrence Arms with Kelly and drummer Neil Hennessy in 1999. The follow-up to the Chicago-bred trio’s 2009 EP Buttsweat and Tears, Metropole threads the Lawrence Arms’s raw and blistering yet hook-heavy sound with a lyrical narrative that captures what vocalist/bassist Brendan Kelly calls “that alone-in-a-crowd, stranger-in-a-strange-land kind of shit-a feeling of such weird solitude that you don’t even know what’s up and what’s down ‘cause you’re so caught in the wake of the city.” Drawing inspiration from both Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and classic late-‘90s hip-hop like Outkast’s Aquemini, Metropole gives off an unstoppably fiery spirit despite the downer subject matter–an effect owing largely to the Lawrence Arms’s infectious chemistry. The Lawrence Arms 2nd Annual War on Christmasįor their first full-length album in nearly eight years, the Lawrence Arms amped up their brand of gritty punk with a newly deepened passion for storytelling-through-songwriting. This show is 17+ w/ Valid State or Federal ID