I Statements, the new album by The Homewreckers, is the kind of album that takes you back to sitting on your porch all summer listening to Punk O Rama hoping you don’t have to talk to anyone, the kind of album you want to shoplift from the mall so you stand a chance of surviving high school.
Fronted by Cristy Road, a Cuban-American QPOC Gemini zine-maker and visual artist, the Homewreckers have made a home for themselves in the queer punk scene, having played Fed Up Fest, Smash it Dead, Punk Island, and countless queer punk shows in New York. I Statements is out on Mooster Records and Nervous Nelly Records, which has released plenty of albums by like-minded bands such as G.L.O.S.S., Parasol, Margy Pepper, and Curmudgeon.
Fittingly, the album speaks from personal experience about everything from poly relationships to smashing capitalism to artificial borders and the embargo with the deeply pop-punk affect of political consciousness, open-hearted earnestness and snarly brattiness. On “Uncontrollable Decay”, Road sings “Don’t stabilize me / or patronize me / Malfunctioning is human so please humanize me,” shrugging off respectability politics, asking for the world to let her live. It’s a good reminder that making space for historically marginalized identities shouldn’t have to go hand in hand with sanctifying the people who embody those identities, but rather making space for all kinds of people to live fully in complicated, messy lives. Both as a song and an ethos, it’s pretty solidly punk.
