Soul Glo talks tribulations and trust on “(Quietly) Do The Right Thing” from new EP Songs to Yeet at the Sun

Philadelphia hardcore punk band Soul Glo will release its latest project, Songs to Yeet at the Sun, this fall via Secret Voice Records and Deathwish.

Out November 6th and available for preorder now, the five-song set collects new studio recordings of a few songs Soul Glo has been circulating in recent years — “Mathed Up” first appeared as a Soundcloud demo in 2018, and “29” and “(Quietly) Do The Right Thing” can be heard on the band’s stellar Live @ WKDU set from earlier this year — while “2k” and “I’m On Probation” are previously unreleased.

The opening track of Yeet, “(Quietly) Do The Right Thing,” is streaming now, and like Soul Glo’s best moments, it is a propulsive punch of high-BPM punk rock, visceral vocals by frontperson Pierce Jordan, atmospheric noise flourishes, and lyrics touching on a spectrum of topics and ideas circling around inequality and oppression.

In the song’s title alone, we get a nod to Spike Lee’s relevant-as-ever 1989 film that questions what is right and moral and just in a society where privilege is historically stacked against non-white folks, and those in power use it to keep the tables from turning more equitably; the additional preface “Quietly” seems to take a critical jab at those who, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter uprisings in June, supported the sentiment of protests but took issue with the violence that resulted. (Lee’s film ends with two quotes about violence in the context of protest movements — one from Martin Luther King Jr., one from Malcolm X — for a deeper perspective.)

As the song opens with a classic a-cappella-shriek-into-a-riff motif (imagine an accelerated take on The Stooges’ “T.V. Eye”) Jordan’s lyrics unfurl in a stream-of-consciousness fury, sometimes alluding and others speaking directly about broken promises; appropriation of ideas and erasure of Black voices; personal rejection in favor of white peers; the pandemic, pride and a lot more. Moreso than reducing things to a simple single topic, the song presents a range of impressions and experiences felt over recent years, and 2020 in particular, with Jordan saying in a gut-wrenching scream, “Oddly enough, I didn’t come to lose my trust in anyone.”

Listen to “(Quietly) Do The Right Thing” below, and preorder a digital download, a cassette, or a vinyl edition of Songs to Yeet at the Sun here. You can read an indepth conversation with Jordan and his bandmate GG Guerra about the gig economy during COVID in their This Is Essential interview with Yoni Kroll, and listen to Jordan talk Beyond the Bars and community building on the More Talk, Less Rock podcast.