Adventure Club by Laura Jane Grace

Before the phrase Adventure Club became the title of Laura Jane Grace’s electrifying and affirming 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 there while she wrote songs about the sordid trials of her life and world—sobriety, autocracy, identity. By night, this new pickup band, including Grace’s wife and collaborator, Paris Campbell Grace, would often play and record. But by day, they’d explore the ancient and beautiful 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 built from equal parts fun and fury, self-definition and self-deprecation. It is all Grace, continuing to recalibrate what punk rock means for her now. 

Two years ago, the Onassis Foundation—launched a half-century earlier, after the shipping titan directed that his fortune be used to promote “aid, progress and development” following his death—invited Grace to Greece. They wanted her to transform “Walls,” a century-old poem of isolation and doubt by Greece’s Constantine P. Cavafy, into a song for a short documentary about inmates learning to express themselves through film while in prison. When she traveled there in early 2024, the filmmaker assembled a pick-up band of local punk rockers (plus Paris) for a string of shows. When the brief tour was done, bad weather delayed her flight home. Waiting for her early-morning exit, she stayed up all night with the ad hoc group and Paris. They recorded a new version of “Walls,” then flew home in a delighted daze. 

Had that really just happened? Had she formed a transcontinental quartet, playfully dubbed the Trauma Tropes, with a Greek rhythm section she’d just met? When she returned six months later after earning a full residency with the Onassis Foundation, the answer instantly became clear: Yes. She’d expected to maybe write an EP. Instead, she cowrote and cut an entire LP with Paris, bassist Jacopo Fokas, and drummer Orestis Lagadinos, that pickup group called The Trauma Tropes. Grace is happily a solo artist these days, a free agent who has moved among different configurations of musicians since her epochal punk band Against Me! began a break in 2020. The Trauma Tropes are less a new band, per se, than a group of new friends finding one another and inspiration in a surprising but right place and time.

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. There is, for instance, the riotous “Wearing Black,” a thundering and hook-bound ode to being the punk or goth amid the rainbows, sparkles, and glitter of a massive Pride Parade. “My pride’s a riot,” she sings during this anthem of self-acceptance. “Not a parade.” There is “I Love to Get High,” a tragicomic blast about enjoying weed so much it no longer works but still trying, anyway. Grace is unapologetic about her choices, howling about dabs, diesel, and her beloved sticky joints as she waits for the next fix to hit. And then there’s “Fuck You Harry Potter,” less a J.K. Rowling diss track than an inspired retelling of the moment when a soused Englishman at a bar near Grace’s St. Louis studio insisted that she reminded him of Eddie Redmayne. She went home and wrote this ripper. 

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. Written in the Onassis Foundation’s window-walled offices as tourists peered inside the fishtank, “Your God (God’s Dick)” is a hilarious, heretic, and brilliant excoriation of religious devotion, or of using God’s supposed words and one’s belief in them to fuck your fellow citizens. A balancing act among Queen, L7, and Elton Motello, it is an instantly addictive tune, a should-be-hit that feels like a brazen test of the new right’s alleged devotion to free speech. (Grace notably plays the Baglamas here, historically associated with Greek protest music, Rebetiko.) Like classic power-pop propelled by Oi!’s revolutionary oomph, “Mine Me Mine” similarly lambastes endless capitalist avarice, or how it is used to manufacture suffering for others. And opener “WWIII,” a song Grace has been trying to perfect for years, is a call to solidarity against all these harmful forces, be they financiers or fascists. “I don’t want to die in World War III,” Grace sings, like Bartleby staring into an impending apocalypse with a scowl. “I don’t want to kill for blood money.”   

But the most prominent thread through Adventure Club’s dozen tracks is one of evolution, of letting yourself become something new. In Grace’s case, that is sometimes reckoning with so-called California sobriety. “The hardest part of getting sober/is pouring yourself out of the bottle,” she sings alongside Paris on “New Years Day” during one of the album’s most poignant moments. It is a theme song for the ever-renewing possibility of always trying again. It’s not unlike “Active Trauma,” really, a stomping number about recognizing that you can never outrun the past (even if, as Grace half-jokes, you actually run to attempt just that). You may, however, be able to overpower it, to “burn this house to the fucking ground.” The other side of this evolution is Grace simply giving herself space to have fun, as with the caffeinated hijinks of “Espresso Freddie,” penned alongside bassist Fokas. Isn’t growing up, again and again, the real Adventure Club, anyway?

Grace talks often about her age, about nearing the second half of her 40s after a lifetime as a punk. What does it mean, really, to remain a punk for 44 years? For Grace, it is the same as it’s always been—a resolve to question everything about oneself and the world around you and to allow yourself to evolve within that framework. Adventure Club epitomizes that spirit the way that the best of Laura Jane Grace’s music always has. The young punk from Florida may never have imagined making a record in Greece, but it does not change the spirit of the songs that inspired them: to create a place where we’re all burdened by less bullshit, whether it’s our own baggage or the stuff that autocrats, capitalists, and assholes simply want to put on us because they don’t know the thrill of being happy and free themselves. Maybe they need to try writing a rock song, or simply jump into the sea.