Downtown Boys broke a nine-year silence with 'Public Luxury,' out now on Sub Pop

Downtown Boys put out "Public Luxury" on June 26 through Sub Pop. It is their third album and the first since 2017's "Cost of Living," a nine-year gap that usually ends with a band either broken up or coming back quieter. Downtown Boys did neither.

They started in Providence in 2012, formed by members who met through a hotel workers' union, and the politics were baked in from the first song. Victoria Ruiz sings, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco plays guitar, and Rolling Stone once called them the most exciting punk band in America. The years since "Cost of Living" were not idle ones. The band scattered into other work and other lives, which is part of why a new record took this long to arrive.

What changed on "Public Luxury" is the room around the songs. They cut it at Machines With Magnets in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, with DeFrancesco co-producing alongside engineer Seth Manchester, and it is the cleanest the band has ever sounded. The saxophone is still there. So is the Latin groove that always set them apart from straight-ahead hardcore. The difference now is that you can hear every piece of it.

The songs

"No Me Jodas" sets the tone. The title is blunt and the song backs it up, opening on a sludgy intro before it breaks into a rallying shout built on Peruvian chicha rhythms. It is confrontational and danceable in the same breath, which is the move this band has chased since the start. Then "Yellow Sun" turns the other way. DeFrancesco's guitar goes shimmery and almost gentle, and Ruiz sings about trees that "grow in every direction, and so heavy with love." For a band wired this tight, a plain moment of hope hits harder than another raised fist.

It does not stay calm for long. "The City Begins" closes back in around you. "It hurts my lungs to breathe in this air," Ruiz sings, and then the next track is titled "Albuterol," in case the metaphor needed a name tag. "Public Works" is a sprint, with Joe DeGeorge's sax sounding like it is running out of air on purpose. "You're a Ghost" races until it tips into something almost videogame-like, the kind of skittering noise that brings Melt-Banana to mind. "Mi Concha," reworked from Ruiz and DeFrancesco's old Malportado Kids side project, runs on syncopation and basically dares you to stand still.

The full lineup carries it: Ruiz and DeFrancesco, DeGeorge on horns, Mary Jane Regalado on bass, and Joey Doubek on drums. The title doubles as the thesis. Public luxury means everything for everyone, and the album keeps swinging between that idea and the daily evidence stacked against it. The band has never pretended its music was anything but political, and most of "Public Luxury" is sung in Spanish. It does not start whispering now.

Where it lands

Reviewers have mostly met the record on its own terms. The Skinny gave it four stars out of five. Distorted Sound landed at 8 out of 10. The Guardian's review called it a joyful blast of bilingual political punk, which is fair, though joy this specific is harder to pull off than the word makes it sound. If there is a knock, it is that a record this urgent rarely gives you a place to sit down, and nine years away raises the bar on every track. Most of them clear it.

There is an easy version of the comeback album, the one that swaps the fire for comfort. Downtown Boys skipped it. They came back louder.