No Man - Glitter and Spit - LP COLORED

Formed in 2017, the four-piece punk band has been alchemizing the personal and the political from the jump. Composed of members from Majority Rule, the band’s current aims go hand-in-hand with their past, sonically and thematically.

Their upcoming album Glitter and Spit is the band’s third full-length LP, solidifying their furious hardcore into a weapon of a record. Album opener “Eat My Twin” twists and refracts a mid-tempo riff into a sonic hammer, cracking open the record’s heaviness to come. Singer Maha Shami has fully come into her own as a frontperson, snarling out the most vicious vocals of her career on “Poison Darts.”

As the daughter of refugees, returning home to Palestine included witnessing first-hand the casual atrocities inflicted on her family. Though written before the current conflict’s boiling point, Glitter and Spit synthesizes the 70+ years of systemic violence carried out against Palestine and her own lived experiences. From school teachers and classmates telling her Palestine doesn’t exist, to being humiliated by soldiers at checkpoints when she visited her family, these many moments fuel the album’s lifeblood, coalescing on “Can’t Kill Us All.”

“They want to silence us,” Shami said at a recent benefit show in D.C. “We will be louder. We aren’t fucking going anywhere. Because Palestine will never die.” Glitter and Spit is a much-needed fire of an album, fueled by the anxieties and anger of the now, erupting in a cathartic inferno.

The band’s members Matt Michel (guitar/vocals), Pat Broderick (drums) and Kevin Lamiell (Bass) helped lay the foundation for hardcore and screamo in Majority Rule from 1996 to 2004. Alongside the band, vocalist Maha Shami has been a longtime friend, giving a “cameo” guest vocal performance on Majority Rule’s “Packaged Poison” in 2004. When Majority Rule reunited in 2017 to perform multiple benefit shows, it ignited a desire to keep creating, and no one was better equipped to step in as front person than Shami.