Naked Aggression

Few hard-edged punk bands were as blatantly pissed off about politics in the ’90s than Naked Aggression. Formed in 1990 by singer Kirsten Patches and guitarist Phil Suchomel among the breweries and cheese factories of Madison, Wisconsin, Naked Aggression’s original purpose was to protest the first Gulf War. The band’s debut record, 1993’s Bitter Youth (Broken Rekids), was the first of three full-lengths containing N.A.’s ballistic onslaught of anger wrapped around barreling beats and screechy guitars. And if listeners didn’t pick up the politics in the anarchistic song structures, lyrics like “100,000 dead in our latest fascist war/Now do you realize what our government stands for?/Don’t just watch it on TV/Go out and protest in the streets” made them clear. Naked Aggression dissolved in 1998, following Suchomel’s death from chronic asthma complications. Patches spent five years in mourning but felt compelled to reform Naked Aggression in 2003 to rage against the Iraq war. And if the songs on the band’s new Assassin Wanted EP are any indication, they’ve only gotten angrier. In “Bankrupt,” for example, Patches asserts the U.S. is the “land of corporate fascism,” before chanting, “In the land of the free where freedom isn’t free.”