The first American Hardcore band to play in East Africa, Stick To Your Guns are no mere tourists when it comes to breaking down boundaries. Known for their ability to incite intellectual thought as they inspire sweaty moshpits, this Orange County quintet has blazed a heartfelt trail across heavy music for the past twenty-two years.
Albums such as 2012’s Diamond, 2015’s Disobedient, 2017’s True View, and 2022’s Spectre stand as firm testaments to a group of individuals—Jesse Barnett (vocals), Josh James (guitar), Chris Rawson (guitar), Andrew Rose (bass), and Adam Galindo (drums)—who are not only accomplished musicians but also have something passionate to say. Enmeshing rapid-fire emotions with powerful breakdowns juxtaposed against catchy hooks, the band has carved a strong name among those searching for an outlet for their own frustrations and anxieties.
These issues, both micro and macro, have always weighed heavy on Stick To Your Guns. And their latest release, Keep Planting Flowers—their eighth full-length—is set to prove just this when it arrives on Friday, January 10, 2025, through SharpTone Records.
Of course, there are bands that bury their seeds of wisdom so deep that only hallucinogens know where they lie and those that proudly bludgeon dead horses year after painful year for mindless sport. Stick To Your Guns are neither of these. A compassionate believer in compromise (and devoted animal lover) and mindful disobedience, Barnett’s onstage banter makes it clear that we all have a place in that crowd and something to learn from one another.
The same can be said for Keep Planting Flowers, his band’s debut for SharpTone Records. An x-ray of these times in which many of us struggle to understand those around us, and even ourselves, these 10 tracks are astute observations on apathy, power, delusion, and desperation, and the monsters that they create.
And those monsters can live inside each of us. No surprise, as we exist in a world where truth has become an amorphous entity. Our screams fall on deaf ears as those around us fight to find meaning for the fallacies that have now become reality. Compromise is a dirty word. Power is a drug, and greed is a badge of (dis)honor. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have written, “ . . . Nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
These Cali musicians, however, have a much better way of relaying this message with an emphasis that is both immediately striking and infinitely haunting. As they explore everything from hate and its cousin anger to the inevitable void beyond this mortal plain, Barnett and Co. step with an intelligently poetic toe, guiding listeners toward their own conclusions by planting an initial kernel for thought.
A delicate transference of wisdom is nothing new within the band’s creative endeavors. Yet, Keep Planting Flowers displays a quintet that is stepping up its game and experimenting with new flourishes as they reenergize. The mile-high choruses of “Spineless” and deliciously catchy “Eats Me Up” and even the guttural slam of “Permanent Dark” never reach too far from their roots, all as they proudly display a musical unit that is willing to color outside the traditional lines. Certainly, it’s this idea of sowing small surprises that dust across the balladesque first moments of “Keep Planting Flowers,” Barnett’s pained howls packed with monumental emotion that is par for the course—but no less powerful.
For this, these ten songs are tried and true Stick To Your Guns with a dollop of something more. They demand answers (“When will it be enough for you savages?”) and beg listeners to refuse to be complicit. It’s a loving deluge that delivers guest onslaughts from Hardcore stateman Scott Vogel (Terror), and the incendiary Connie Sgarbossa (SeeYouSpaceCowboy), all as it humbly asks listeners to just want to do better.
In the end, “For those who’ve been truly devoured: keep planting flowers” is a poignant epitaph for an album that respects life’s struggles as well as its beauty, recognizes the ugly issues we currently face beyond any political lines, and presents a blossom of hope for the future. Sure, 2025 is primed to be a complicated dumpsterfire, but it is one that is worth surviving alongside Stick To Your Guns.
For all of the above, as flowery as it may seem, Cryptic Rock gives Keep Planting Flowers 5 out of 5 stars.
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