EPK

“Exploding from the speakers like a chiming, left-of-the-dial 1980s college-radio classic, “F*ck the Future” finds L.A.’s Walks of Life unapologetically wearing their vintage jangle-rock influences on their sleeve—from The Replacements and Soul Asylum to R.E.M, The Jam, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. The angsty, post-punk-tinged new single hearkens back to a time when rock & roll was the collective voice of unsatisfied, alienated youth.”

But while “F*ck the Future” is a frenetic and deeply satisfying musical throwback, its lyrical content couldn’t be more of-the-moment. The working-class anthem captures the late-capitalist zeitgeist for the hordes of disenchanted Millennials & Zoomers left wandering the smoking wreckage of Boomer greed and selfishness that is America in this foul Year of Our Lord, 2024.

In the song’s opening lines,” Walks of Life singer-guitarist Sam Marine opines, “The disillusion of a fading way / But you still work as hard every day,” delivering a stark and cutting rebuke of the Woodstock generation, with its platitudes and hollow advice.

“You can bust your ass as much as they ever told you,” Marine says, “but certain things—like buying a house and having all these safety nets in life, things that they had with ease for the most part—you’re just never gonna get that. So ‘F*ck the Future’ is calling out that whole situation. Like it says in the song, ‘They want more, they got in, then they locked the door.’ I'm not being a crybaby about it. It is what it is. But there are a lot of Reagan votes in the room with that generation. Things have definitely become rigged in a way where they’re always going to be doing just fine, but for the rest of us it gets harder every year.”

Over a pounding drum beat, Marine belts with palpable desperation, “I can feel it gaining on me / You don’t wake up from this kind of dream.” He’s of course talking about the American Dream. As a songwriter, Marine’s attention to detail adds serious depth. Little Easter eggs abound. Take the new single’s “na na na” chorus for example. It’s a callback to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Vietnam-era anthem “Ohio,” which chronicled the 1970 Kent State Massacre, in which students protesting the war were gunned down on campus by the National Guard. Marine draws parallels here to the modern civil-rights protests over the Murder of George Floyd and the mass-killing of Palestinian civilians, both met with savage police brutality.

“It’s another plea to the Boomers,” he explains. “I incorporated the same ‘na na na’s’ with a more punk delivery to see if I could maybe slap ‘em in the head with it, like, ‘Wake up! You saw some f*cked up, oppressive things happen when you were younger. Have you forgotten?’”

But never one to revel in unchecked self-righteousness, in the next verse, Marine turns the crosshairs on himself and his own Millennial cohort. “As the song unfolds, it’s really about how each successive generation is guilty of the same thing,” he says. I'm starting to see it in my own generation now too—a lot of people my age are starting to not give a f*ck. The way most people go about their lives, it's pretty live-for-today. Not too many people are thinking about later on down the road. I think it's very human to say, ‘Well, we’re doing our best,’ because life is hard, and most people really are doing their best. But we still end up handing down this shitstorm. At this point, I'm thinking about the environment, about climate change—we're handing this next generation a pretty f*cked up bag.”

The Walks of Life—Sam Marine (lead vocals, guitar), Zach Jones (bass, backing vocals), Joe Guese (lead guitar) and Stamati Arakas (drums)—recorded “F*ck the Future” with producer / engineer Aaron Stern at Verdugo Sound, a cool little one-bedroom house turned studio in L.A.’s Glassell Park neighborhood. To draw out the kind of spontaneous, unvarnished sound that would fit the urgency of the lyrics, Stern insisted that Marine keep the rest of the band almost completely in the dark on the song before the sessions.

“Aaron wanted the rest of the guys to come in super raw,” Marine says. “So we ended up working the tune out in about 10 minutes in the studio just before we cut it. I love that approach to recording. We really went hard on this one—the whole band just came in unrehearsed and ready for anything, and we got lucky. Because when you take that kind of a chance, there’s no guarantee it’s gonna work out. But this time it did.”

Full of raucous, transcendent, rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light energy, “F*ck the Future”—despite its heavy subject matter—is not meant to be a nihilistic bummer, Marine explains.

“Look, I’m not GG Allin,” he says. “The title is more of a wise-assed, sarcastic turn of phrase. And at the same time, my heart is on my sleeve with this song as much as I'm ever going to put it there. I'm a bit of a stubborn optimist too—there’s a part of me that, despite everything I’ve already said, is still chasing that elusive American Dream I grew up with. The one my parents’ generation promised.Something in me still believes I can achieve that if I'm just a relentless working bastard. And, for good or ill, I'm still willing to chase my tail and run in circles to try to get there. And ‘Fuck the Future is about that too. It’s about all of that.”