Public Luxury | Downtown Boys

Description

Cover Notes: Downtown Boys have pushed relentlessly forward as an artistic and political project since their founding. Singer Victoria Marie and guitarist/singer Joey La Neve DeFrancesco first met at union meetings while working together at a hotel in Providence, RI, writing many of the band’s early songs about labour organising and exploitative workplaces. The quintet is completed by Joe DeGeorge (sax/synth), Mary Jane Regalado (bass), and Joey Doubek (drums). Over years of touring, and three acclaimed albums, Downtown Boys have continued to grow as artists, musicians, and organisers. Now, the band has arrived with ‘Public Luxury’, an enthralling album that keeps politics front and centre while summoning the band’s most urgent and powerful sound to date. The definition of ‘Public Luxury’ falls very much in line with that of the title of the second Downtown Boys LP, ‘Full Communism’. Straight up, ‘Public Luxury’ means, ‘everything for everyone’. It’s the stubborn insistence that a better world is possible, while fully recognising the horrors we witness daily, and the individual and collective responsibility to resist the nihilism and hopelessness we all feel.