To say that STRENGTH IN NUMB333RS was an album that the world needed in 2019 is an understatement. Released at the very start of the year, as both the months and political frustrations unfolded, its songs became even more relevant, even more necessary and even more potent.
Yet to cast it purely as a reaction to more recent events – specifically the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency, the resulting rise in racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny and homophobia, and a vast and ever-widening political divide between those on the right and the left – is reductive. Because as much as that plays a part here, the roots of this album, and FEVER 333, go much further back. It takes in the entire history of the USA; a country built on the backs of slaves, in which the ruling classes have thrived on the systemic oppression of minorities, in particular African-Americans. Then there’s the nation’s unwavering stance on gun ownership despite mass shootings occurring on a regular basis, police brutality, the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, the prison-industrial complex, Big Pharma and the for-profit healthcare system, both of which make it too expensive to get sick. It’s enough to make you want to start a revolution.
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That’s exactly what STRENGTH IN NUMB333RS is, both in terms of its music and the way its message has been spreading. Even the ‘3’s in their name and album title relate to the band’s core values of community, charity and change.
Released 10 months after FEVER 333’s debut EP, Made An America, the band’s debut doubled-down on that original message. The intensity, the politics and the personal nature of the stories are all here in equal measure, propelled by frontman Jason Aalon Butler’s incendiary vocals and radical political mindset. After all, the band’s logo and ideologies are both based on (and a tribute to) the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense that was created in the mid-’60s, when racial tension and inequality in the States were at unprecedented highs. And just as the Black Panthers were prepared to take to the streets in order to fight for their rights, so STRENGTH IN NUMB333RS serves as a riot designed to overthrow the status quo and take on injustice.