Punk rocker Laura Jane Grace has shared new single “New Years Day,” off the highly-anticipated just released album Adventure Club.
Polyvinyl Record Co. and Laura Jane Grace’s new album Adventure Club is a new and incendiary, 12-song collection exploring the archetypical hero’s journey tropes from classic Greek mythology: love, war, trust, betrayal, virtue & vice, iced coffee drinks — it’s all there, and so is the fun! Featuring the help of Grace’s wife and collaborator Paris Campbell Grace (vocals) and Athens, Greece-based musicians Jacopo “Jack” Fokas (bass) and Orestis Lagadinos (drums), Adventure Club is the product of a month-long, life-changing trip and songwriting retreat in Greece that came by way of a Fellowship grant through the Onassis Foundation that provided Grace with the inspiration to create some of the best punk she’s ever made.
Before the phrase “Adventure Club” became the title of Laura Jane Grace’s electrifying new album, it was the name for her gaggle of adventurous friends in Greece. In the summer of 2024, Grace joined an artist residency program in Athens, embedding with Greek punk rockers and exploring the ancient landscape and the city’s vibrant culture. They dove from beaches nestled in seaside caves into the Aegean and swam with sea turtles. They submitted to tourism, seeing the Parthenon and Epidaurus and breaking into the Panathenaic Stadium to run its track. They became addicted to Freddo espresso, a locals-only iced coffee topped with whipped milk. The lifestyle of this “Adventure Club” inspired her so much that, by the time she left Greece, she’d unexpectedly finished Adventure Club, a new career apogee that recalibrates what punk rock means for her now.
Adventure Club is frequently a record about learning to take up space, about feeling free to be yourself as the bullshit of our ahistoric moment mounts. Protest songs and personal tunes have never been a binary for Grace, and she delivers some of her most profound — and, yes, playful — work ever at that particular intersection here. But the most prominent thread through Adventure Club’s dozen tracks is one of evolution, of letting yourself become something new.
