Downtown Boys are skipping recess

The fact that recording projects are universally considered goalposts for a band’s overall activity seems to contradict conventional wisdom.  Shouldn’t it make much more sense to acknowledge to what extent a band makes its presence felt in a public space? Not to mention the often unseen labour of organising within their communities, recognisant of music’s rampant ability to mobilise, reflect, revolt, and celebrate?

Within these much more credible parameters, Downtown Boys never ever left. A big chunk of the Providence punk collective’s roots are burrowed in the What Cheer? Brigade (now Undertow Brass Band), an activist Rhode Island brass band, as well as grassroots “radical culture spaces” like the defunct Spark City. 

“With the brass band, the purpose was very much political: playing protests, picket lines, parades,” says guitarist/songwriter Joey DeFrancesco. “Victoria and I both worked at a hotel where we were unionising, and the brass band would come play on the picket lines and at strike actions. It was a street band for political protest.”

Downtown Boys, as a five-piece punk band, continued to have that same community-driven and confrontational ethos since they first started out. The shows were meant to be sweaty, physical, and participatory – fun and frenzy powering through the dread like this unbreakable battering ram. One particular show I witnessed at Beaches Brew, a free festival at Italy’s Ravenna, felt like that: a whole crowd dancing, picking up instruments and the band members themselves. The chaos spilling out joyously from the stage onto the beach. DeFrancesco cites it as his favourite Downtown Boys show so far.

“When we moved into Downtown Boys, the music changed a lot,” DeFrancesco explains. “But that political core stayed. Coming out of the Providence scene and that brass band world, we were always trying to engage the audience and create these physically cathartic experiences at shows.”

Vocalist Victoria Marie, who moved from San Jose to New England to join Downtown Boys, met DeFrancesco at a protest rally in Boston. She recollects one particular Downtown Boys show that remains etched in her heart: a grassroots gig in Oakland during the band’s very first West Coast tour that was attended by her late grandmother, who passed away last year, a beloved figure for the entire band.

“I think the place we played that day is now closed down, but it was a DIY show that was also a cafe and a bookstore,” Marie remembers. “And my grandma and my uncle, who also passed away, were there. And they both just loved the band so much. They loved Joey so much. They really thought that what we were doing was so cool, and music was really special to both of them. And there was a really crazy mosh pit. Then the crowd kind of made this perfect row for my grandma and my Nino, who were sitting in chairs that they brought on their own.”

Marie tells me how her grandmother taught herself English, and how she spoke English and Spanish completely fluently. “If you heard her in one language, you wouldn’t know she spoke the other. That’s how fluent she was in both. You would think each was her first language. And she did it through music and TV. She was a farm worker who never formally learned to read or write.”

Before recollecting the show, Marie was quick to point out the divide in wealth in the Bay Area, which is far wider than anything she has seen on the East Coast. She says that in other countries it’s pretty common to be illiterate and know multiple languages, but that’s not really something that happens in the US. Everyone knows how to read and write in one language before they learn another one.

“But they were there, and the crowd was really punk. It was when I think we were still beloved by real, like, would-never-do-a-record-on-Sub Pop-type of punks. My Nino was a really big guy, so he would bring his own little chair to things, like folding picnic chairs. And then my grandma was there, and the crowd was so sweet to them. I remember it was still digital camera times – more people were taking pictures of them than us, because they were so happy. So, yeah, that show will always be in our minds. And I think when she passed away, those are the shows that now are just so visible in my mind.”

On their new album Public Luxury, Downtown Boys capture the messiness inherent of a group with one leg anchored in the industry machine and another firmly and defiantly within the grassroots infrastructures that informed both their value system and sound so vehemently. One could convincingly argue that this is a big reason for the nine-year gap between two albums; a natural consequence of the quintet’s overriding concern to rally against what Marie calls “the colonial project”.

As a working class band, Downtown Boys can’t afford the privilege of a removal from these very concerns. Neither can they expel themselves into a vacuum of artistic or scene-oriented solipsism. By cause and effect, activism and music remain in urgent symbiosis – a stubbornly joyous symbiosis at that. “We’ve always existed in this space where we’re touching bigger elements of the music industry while maintaining deep connections to grassroots DIY and punk networks we’ve been part of for many years,” DeFrancesco explains. “Networks other people built that we joined and tried to nurture. It’s important to us to maintain that.”

For instance, the New York City release show for Public Luxury is with longtime friends Ratas En Zelo, a band they’ve been playing with since their formative years. Public Luxury was recorded in Rhode Island at a studio called Machines With Magnets, just outside Providence in Pawtucket – a space that was also a DIY venue for about a decade. Producer Seth Manchester was one of the first people to book Downtown Boys in Rhode Island way back when. DeFrancesco: “We played that space many, many times when it was still functioning as a DIY venue, so getting to record the album there was really special.”

“We did our photo shoots at another DIY space down the street from there. Our record release show is at a small venue in Willimantic, Connecticut, a tiny town that was important to us early on. There used to be a little record store there that was one of the first places outside Providence that reached out and started having shows for us. This release show there is also a benefit for the local soup kitchen. We’ve been lucky to play festivals and put records out on Sub Pop, but we’re still very firmly entrenched in that same universe.”

Concurrently, DeFrancesco can say, with troubling certainty even, that these kinds of connections are becoming harder and harder to maintain. “COVID absolutely decimated a lot of local music communities in the US,” he says. 

“We haven’t done a serious national tour in a long time – mostly just shorter runs in the Northeast. Booking this tour, we were asking: What bands are still around? What spaces are still around? COVID shut down so many venues and made it so much less economically viable to be in a band. There are fewer local bands now. People are still doing it, and it’s beautiful and great. But the infrastructure for a national DIY scene, especially in mid-sized and smaller cities, has been hit really hard. And on top of that, there’s been this ongoing corporate consolidation of the music industry since even before COVID.”

During the pandemic, among other endeavors, DeFrancesco was deeply involved with UMAW – United Musicians and Allied Workers. 

“We were having these conversations for years with people who wanted an organisation like this and wanted to talk about what we can do to change the music industry. When COVID hit, that’s when I started sending out emails about UMAW. The people I reached out to were folks we had played with, people who shared similar politics and views. So the union was a pretty natural outgrowth of the band’s existing political project.”

Marie, meanwhile, started working as a public defence attorney in 2020 during the uprising after George Floyd’s murder. “That period has been extremely present in the US these past years, and obviously it’s connected to the music and to what I do in the band as a singer – using the show space as a platform. She describes her day job as “being a medic in a war zone”, a direct service to people who’ve already been dragged through the system. 

The calling of being public servants and the luxury of being in a signed punk band that can amplify these lived experiences to greater masses – it’s a treacherous balancing act both DeFrancesco and Marie don’t take lightly. In a time where the gravest of crises can quickly become yesterday’s news, there was a preoccupation towards the resilience and malleability of Downtown Boys – as both a creative outlet and a political one. 

Marie’s earlier story about how her deceased grandmother was able to seamlessly switch between Spanish and English is another sign that within infrastructures untethered from capitalism, language can alter and evolve in radical new ways. It’s something musical movements like hip-hop and punk have proven across the more recent ripples of time. 

On Public Luxury, you can hear that restless flux almost manifesting in real time – between the more traditional protest songs, and the ones that unfold more like slam poetry or diasporic prayer. Marie specifically mentions “Sirena” and “Enemy Without”. According to her, the latter was inspired by the words of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian Lebanese revolutionary for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“Mi Concha” is a full-band reworking from an earlier recording by Malpartado Kids, a side project of Marie and DeFrancesco; it initially strikes as a cheeky song about sexual liberation, and it actually spawned within another grassroots space. “There was this Mexican restaurant in Olneyville, in Providence, Rhode Island. We were living in Olneyville at the time, where a lot of the DIY venues and punk venues used to be in Providence. Lightning Bolt, the brass band – a lot of bands came out of Olneyville. And there’s this Mexican restaurant called La Lupita that everyone loves. It’s funny because it’s a mix of Latinos and punks all throughout the restaurant.”

“But they were selling little beauty products. They were selling a cream that had a really pretty shell – I actually have a tattoo of the shell – but it was a lightening cream for your vagina area. Like a skin cream to lighten your skin. And it’s just such a crazy thing that people have been forced to think about, especially in the United States. I mean, everywhere. The lightening of your skin. And it’s completely related to colonialism and racism and sexism.”

“So the lyrics are very much commentary on colonial standards of beauty and white standards of beauty. It’s not lost on me that a huge portion of Trump voters this time around were Latinos. It’s not lost on me when I hear the plea against ICE raids, that these are workers, they’re not criminals. It’s like, why are we dividing ourselves with that? Why are we, as targets of white supremacy, dividing ourselves like this?”

“It doesn’t matter if someone has stolen something from a CVS,” she continues. “They shouldn’t be kidnapped by ICE and put into a deportation prison. I don’t care if the person has “committed a crime” or not. This should not happen. And so I think it’s also a commentary, even for us who are targets of the state: why would we ever cede to a toxic masculinity concept of beauty? And I think sexism is really still just so real. DEI culture was never going to save us. Representation never fully saves us. There needs to be a full redistribution of wealth and power for us, as women of colour, to really take back our power.”

I bring up my interpretation of the track as a sexual liberation song, and whether that would perhaps harmfully diminish “Mi Concha’s” original subtext. Marie says she is receptive to these songs being held up in a different light. It actually speaks to their resilience. She then brings up Marjane Satrapi, the film director, author, and illustrator who passed away the day this interview took place. 

“Her book Persepolis – I remember that being a book that Joey and I really liked when “Mi Concha” was written over 10 years ago. I remember Persepolis being a big text. And the main character in Persepolis has literally everything I just talked about covered, including the sexual liberation aspect. So I do think you’re right. I think it’s all connected to these narratives about us, where women of colour never just get to liberate one thread of ourselves. It constantly has to be our entire identity that’s being talked about.”

Though much of the material on Public Luxury was written over time, DeFrancesco remains surprised by how Downtown Boys’ music keeps organically meeting the current times urgently. “It’s interesting,” he ponders. “We write in response to political developments that remain relevant, and remain very much top of mind, far beyond the exact time of writing, because things keep escalating and cascading in terms of intensity, and the contradictions keep intensifying.”

Hey says that on Cost of Living, the band’s writing manifested largely prior to the first Trump administration. Songs like “A Wall”, which was relevant in the Obama years – the record amount of deportations under Obama – took on a very specific meaning when Trump was literally calling to build this enormous wall on the southern border. DeFrancesco called it an “intensification and escalation of the mass deportation dragnet” that we’re now seeing even more intensified.

“And this has been true with this record also,” he continues. “For instance, the song ‘Yellow Sun’, I wrote maybe in 2023 or 2024, while Israel was bombing Beirut and the south of Lebanon. I was also reading poems by a poet and painter from Lebanon named Etel Adnan. She has a poem called ‘Beirut, 1982’ and a very long-form poem called ‘The Arab Apocalypse’. I was reading both of these, and was inspired by those words to take some of what she was writing, and also what was happening, and try to put it into this song.”

At the moment when “Yellow Sun” is released, Israel is moving further into occupying Lebanon than at any time since 1982. “I’m not sure what the point is there exactly,” DeFrancesco questions. “But I think our political considerations have remained very, very consistent, and the fight we’ve been dedicated to has been very consistent. And in some ways, the songs become, sadly or unfortunately, more and more in direct response to the current moment.”

DeFrancesco says the proto-industrial-sounding “You’re a Ghost” was written in response to some of the police repression, and also more general police repression and anti-trans hatred going on in the US. While he admits this often happens unintentionally, over time, the band has become better at being aware of how the songwriting can transform over the longer haul – and anticipate how things fall into place down the line.

“With the video for that song that we released – an incredible animator named Khalil did the video for that – listening to the song now, it’s like, okay, this has this very obvious meaning in response to the current ICE mass deportation terror in the United States, and then also the police terror against protesters in the United States in response to ICE protests. So I think these songs, in a good way, have this ability to transform meaning in response to current conditions.” 

Marie later mentions that “Khalil was literally making that as our country was bombing his country”. She, too, was more intentional lyrically on Public Luxury, considering how someone might interpret her words 20, 30 years from now, more aware of their temporal resilience. She noticeably jolts up in realising this happened with “Sirena”.  “I also write poetry, and that is something I’ve gotten to do. I was actually looking at a zine that I made called Sirena, that I made in 2020 during COVID. I had forgotten all about that theme, but it had my poetry in it.”

Marie tells me her grandmother used to listen to a lot of Norteño ballads. “My friends, who like cumbias and reggaetón, don’t necessarily like northern Mexican ballads. So norteño ballads are what the mariachi bands often play. It’s that kind of music: a lot of horns and big chords and stuff. But all the lyrics tend to be love songs, and they all tend to be these poems. But you could really apply them to anything. For example, the song “A Wall” that we have – there’s a song called “Entre la espada y la pared”, and it is about love. It’s sort of about the walls of one’s heart and the walls of this relationship. But when my grandma heard our song, she was like, ‘it reminds me of this song.’ And the Spanish song was a love song, but she was like, ‘but it could be about anything.’”

“That made me really realise: wow, she really understands what we’re writing about. Because ultimately, it’s all kind of about love. It all comes back to that, and what you really care so deeply about, and what you really want to fight for. There’s nothing different about a revolutionary spirit than that. And so I think that really inspired the thinking about how to write. Some of the lyrics are just truly pulled from norteño ballads, where their love is – they use all these beautiful analogies. And I think that is often what a poet does for the revolution as well.”

Marie also listened to a lot more country music: “Freddy Fender, Lucinda Williams, are, I think, the idea of a storyteller. I think that is really helpful. And then, thirdly, we have a friend who was really active in the protests in 2020 and faced criminalisation for it. And when you’re with your friends going through the hardest time that they’ve been through yet, you don’t necessarily spend all the time talking about their worst moment that you’re trying to be sympathetic or empathetic to.”

Within the shell of a story or a poem, trauma and survival won’t always feel like this all-consuming force stripping away the very things that make us human. “This friend in particular spoke a lot about sirens. She got really obsessed with sirens. That’s why she liked the show Game of Thrones. But then we started to talk about sirens a lot. And I was also thinking about how we are going through some really tough times right now.”

Marie asserts that in the US, people love to fake this idea of self-care: “To a certain extent, I feel like every boss is supposed to ask you, ‘what are you doing to take care of yourself?’ And it’s just like, don’t ask me that. You’re the last person that should ask me that. That’s like a bartender asking someone, ‘what are you doing to stop drinking?’ It’s so crass. You’re my boss. Clearly, why would I tell you?”

Marie believes there’s something “really real” about what we do with each other and how we show up for each other. On a beach in Ravenna, a venue in Oakland, or a restaurant in Olneyville – behind an office desk or a living room sofa. Sometimes even beyond the physical, in the shape of a text message in the morning. 

Whenever solid earth feels too heavy, the water demands. 

“Sometimes care is: how do we keep everything that we’re going through in our memory?” Marie asks. “And at the same time, find these glimmers: poking holes through the wall for the light to come in.”