Last month, Anti-Flag unveiled their 13th album, Lies They Tell Our Children. The punk-rock veterans also will hit the road on separate 2023 tours with Flogging Molly and the Bouncing Souls.
First, Anti-Flag will support Flogging Molly on a winter outing that kicks off Thursday night (February 2nd) in Austin, Texas, and runs through a March 19th show in Reno, Nevada. Then they’ll head out on tour with the Bouncing Souls for two legs, one in April and another in October. Tickets to most shows are available via Ticketmaster or StubHub.
Anti-Flag have been tackling sociopolitical issues for 30 years now, and that’s no different on Lies They Tell Our Children. The LP, which was released on January 6th of this year, features guest spots from Jesse Leach (Killswitch Engage), Tim McIlrath (Rise Against), and Brian Baker (Minor Threat, Bad Religion), among others.
Prior to the release of the album, Heavy Consequence caught up with frontman Justin Sane at the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, Kentucky.
Regarding the album’s title, Sane told us in the video above, “Lies They Tell Our Children was a pamphlet that was put out by the fossil-fuel industry in the 1980s. The fossil-fuel industry did all this research on burning carbon, and what they realized was that they were heating up the atmosphere. So they realized they were creating global warming.”
He continued, “As that information leaked out and other scientists were doing the same kind of work and coming to the same conclusion, the fossil-fuel industry started putting out all this propaganda to confuse people and make people think that global warming wasn’t real. One of the pamphlets they put out was called Lies They Tell Our Children.”
Sane also touched on the single “Imperialism,” and how it relates to the current war in Ukraine. “Obviously, with the war in Ukraine, that has really been on our minds a lot, because we’ve been to Ukraine a lot, and we’ve been to Russia a lot. … Clearly, the war was started by Putin. Very few people in Russia see it that way, but because of the kind of band we are, we know people in Russia who are agitators and people who are fighting for human rights … so they could see what was happening.”
He added, “Of course, imperialism is an issue that’s gone on now for hundreds and hundreds of years, and almost every major superpower is guilty of it.”
Sane also discussed the 10th anniversary of Anti-Flag’s ninth album, The General Strike, which was recently reissued, as well as his thoughts on the band’s 30-year career. Watch the full interview in the video above.
Trouble viewing the video in the player above? Watch on YouTube.