BrooklynVegan has teamed with Rise Against on an exclusive, limited edition black/clear vinyl variant of their new album. Pre-order it here.

Rise Against‘s ninth album Nowhere Generation is on the way, but before it gets here, the band will do their first live performance of the new material today (4/6) at 2 PM ET, prefaced by a live Q&A at 1:45 PM ET. UPDATE: Both videos are out now. Watch:

The album reunites Rise Against with longtime producers Bill Stevenson (Black Flag, Descendents) and Jason Livermore, and it has an urgent message that was inspired by frontman Tim McIlrath looking at the world that was handed to today’s younger generations, and the ways in which millennials and gen Z have navigated this world and rallied around causes that they believe in. Tim spoke about this in a video that accompanied the release of the title track, and he expanded on it in a new interview with Revolver:

I’m always trying to figure out what voice to use in a song. A lot of my songs come from the perspective of a character, they’re not always me. In this one, I really wanted to put myself in the listener’s perspective … This song was sort of inspired by a lot of the younger generation telling me about their anxieties, their concerns and worries about the future of the world around them. At first I treated those accounts as, Well, yeah, that’s every generation. We’re all swimming upstream against the tide, trying to overcome it. But the tide nowadays has been manipulated. It’s driven by a lot of external forces, which create things like the rise of the one percent, concentrated wealth, the decay of the middle class, exploding college debt. I realized that a lot of the issues that this generation is facing are new and unique to this generation.

The sad irony, the kick in the teeth to all of this, is that I feel like “Millennial” became a dirty word. It became a punch line. It became, “Oh these people are entitled and self-absorbed. They don’t know how to pick up the phone or run errands.” But when you realize what they’re faced with, you can see [how] that paralysis might be created. When you grow up in a world where you no longer trust the institutions around you to support you, or if you believe that the ladder to success has been burned away by somebody who used it before you — that affects you psychologically. It affects the way you look at the world. I wanted the song to come from that voice. I started to find real sympathy with these concerns and complaints. It was very much inspired by the people in our front row.

Read more here. The new Rise Against album drops June 4 via Loma Vista, and you can pre-order it on limited edition, “inky black on clear” vinyl in the BrooklynVegan store.

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