Dropkick Murphys

After 26 years, Boston’s Dropkick Murphys put down their pencils, picked up their acoustic guitars, and wrote an album of songs around some previously unseen Woody Guthrie lyrics. The power of Woody’s words meets the urgency of Dropkick Murphys' music on This Machine Still Kills Fascists (out September 30 via the band's own Dummy Luck Music / [PIAS]). Dropkick Murphys break new ground visiting old territory: bringing Woody Guthrie’s perennial jabs at life into the time of their lives – turning missives from over half a century ago into something eerily relevant to today’s world. Or perhaps simply revealing the timeless essence of the human struggle.

When Dropkick Murphys formed in a barbershop basement in 1996, the goal wasn't to turn the infield at Fenway Park into a concert stage, or to turn a forgotten scrap of a Woody Guthrie lyric into an anthem ("I'm Shipping Up To Boston") that would echo from Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed to sports arenas and championship parades. The goal wasn't to become punk rock icons or emblems of working class Boston. The goal certainly wasn't to still be going strong a quarter-century later. The goal was simply to win a bet.

After nearly a dozen studio albums, millions of records sold, thousands of shows before packed houses around the globe, thousands of dollars raised by the band's charity The Claddagh Fund, and a few rounds of golf with the legendary Bobby Orr, it's safe to say that Dropkick Murphys won the bet. Their celebrated discography includes four consecutive Billboard top 10 album debuts – Turn Up That Dial (2021), 11 Short Stories Of Pain & Glory (2017), Signed and Sealed in Blood (2013), Going Out In Style (2011) – along with 2005’s gold-selling The Warrior’s Code featuring the near double platinum classic “I’m Shipping Up To Boston.”

This Machine Still Kills Fascists continues a journey with Woody Guthrie that began nearly two decades ago with "Gonna Be A Blackout Tonight" (from 2003's Blackout) and "I'm Shipping Up To Boston." For those two songs, Dropkick Murphys pulled Guthrie’s lyrics into their musical world, giving them the DKM treatment through and through. For this album – created from a larger body of mostly unpublished works, curated for the band by Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie – they knew they needed to enter Woody’s musical world, an altogether new challenge for a band whose raw power had relied on searing electric guitars up until this point. Not a tribute album or a collection of covers, This Machine Still Kills Fascists is a collaboration between Dropkick Murphys and Woody Guthrie – artists separated by time and space, but connected by a common philosophy – to create something entirely new.