Soul Glo are only now reaching the height of their powers, but from their perspective, their days have never felt more numbered. Their upcoming full-length, Diaspora Problems, should be a victory lap for the ace Philadelphia outfit: Though long hailed as one of American hardcore’s leading lights, they are only now achieving widespread notoriety on the strength of last year’s DisNigga Vol. 2, their first release for Epitaph. On the new album’s lead single, ““Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!)((By the Future))”,” it’s precisely that success that’s got vocalist Pierce Jordan bursting with righteous anxiety.
Dissecting the uniquely cruel entropy that plagues Black musicians, Jordan summons the ghosts of two of its most recent casualties—Juice WRLD and Pop Smoke—in a grim illustration of the borrowed time he’s living on. The band churns in slash-and-burn lockstep behind him, splattering distorted color across every bar as Jordan rails breathlessly against the target he’s painted on his own back by daring to self-actualize. “We just left a century of artists whose screams went purposefully unheard,” he howls as his bandmates punctuate the words with a screeching wall of noise. He mocks those who would question his memory for dense rhymes (“I don’t need to make mental notes when this shit is just the truth”) and the cyclical liberal optimism for a better tomorrow that never arrives.
Jordan knows that urgency is second nature to the condemned: “Would you be surprised if I died next week?” he asks, realizing there’s not a moment to spare waiting for an answer—better to attack the next riff and keep the tour van running. As his crew defiantly charges across the minefield of minor league fame, Jordan savors a bittersweet truth: His untimely death would serve as the ultimate proof of concept for Soul Glo.
