Fifteen years ago, Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff chose their band name to celebrate outsiders who threatened the status quo: “the riff raff” being “the weirdos and the poets,” they once said, “the rebellious women and the activists” whom society disregarded. These were the people who kept Segarra going as they carved an itinerant path from their fractured Bronx upbringing to their longtime home in New Orleans, from the Lower East Side hardcore matinees of their youth to their escape hopping freight trains. Their voice traveled, too, growing from the forthright grace of Gillian Welch through the brash fortitude of Bruce Springsteen or Joe Strummer: a person talking straight to you. Where Segarra invoked Whitmanian transcendence on 2014’s “The Body Electric”—a feminist indictment of the murder-ballad tradition from their Americana breakout, Small Town Heroes—they directly triangulated the past, present, and future on their 2017 masterpiece, the rallying cry “Pa’lante.”
In that anthem describing the immigrant experience in America, Segarra ferociously called out to those “who had to hide,” who “lost their pride,” to “all who came before,” carrying the fight forward. The song is cracked open, traversing a continuum of historical struggle that is ongoing. Watch the 2021 documentary Takeover—about the NYC chapter of Puerto Rican revolutionary coalition the Young Lords and how they occupied the South Bronx’s Lennox Hospital in 1970, seizing it as “The People’s Hospital”—and when “Pa’lante” soundtracks its final moments you will see not only what art is capable of but what it is for.
Segarra’s eighth album is titled Life on Earth, seeming to ask, by its final notes: How will you spend yours? They transform their sound with glowing synthesizers and sunstruck hooks to answer this call. Segarra has made powerful records in the past by working within vernacular traditions, or constructing autofictive characters and concepts, like on 2017’s The Navigator, where they sought to reclaim their Puerto Rican identity. But Segarra has never sounded more honest or self-possessed than on Life on Earth. They have found a fresh collaborator in indie-rock producer Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver) and opened a new chapter. Dressed like a Fabulous Stain on the album’s cover—the inside typography evoking anarcho legends Crass and reading “BLESS ALL BEINGS RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES”—Segarra has, in some sense, circled back to the raw openness of their earliest homespun releases. They once identified as a folk singer, but their sound now exudes a glorious irreverence, maybe a way of saying that old traditions, or at least their present iterations, cannot serve the current crises, which these songs consistently take on.