Destiny Bond Knows the Power of Punk

“Good things may pass away with time, and good people can be hard to find, until you find them in yourself,” shouts Destiny Bond frontwoman Cloe Madonna on “Can’t Kill the Love,” off the band’s upcoming LP, The Love. The lyric reflects the album’s focus on empowerment and the immortal powers of art and punk, which even a corrupt society can’t stop. As the song goes: “Can’t kill the love, can’t kill what it does.”

Due out on Convulse Records on October 17, the hardcore record feels as rooted in old-school punk as it does in riffy rock and roll. Madonna’s uncoiled, melodic yells, backed by wailing guitars and fast, dynamic rhythms, make the album feel simultaneously urgent and timeless.

We catch up with Madonna while she’s in the back of a tour van for a Destiny Bond run with Glare, Cloakroom and Jivebomb. At a recent gig in San Antonio, Texas, she lost a tooth; it’s the second time that’s happened to her at a show in the Lone Star State, she notes. “I hit it with my microphone, and it just shattered out of my mouth,” she says with a laugh.

Madonna grew up in Wyoming, but would regularly make trips to Denver to catch touring bands before moving here in the 2010s. Destiny Bond formed in 2021 with drummer Adam Croft (who founded Convulse Records), bassist Rio Wolf and guitarist Amos Helvey, and Madonna joined the hardcore outfit alongside guitarist Emily Armitage before the release of its 2022 demo tape. The band has always been about uplifting community, and she tells us that The Love continues that ethos. “It’s kind of a record about just the enduring spirit of the lives of the members of this band,” Madonna explains.

“And as you get more into it, there’s a lot of introspective lyrics about readying yourself to have a better chance at survival, and surviving in the groups that you exist in, and building a bigger foundation to keep that alive,” the vocalist adds. “And then also just never giving up the fight, knowing that, even despite the odds, the fight will persist and the things that we believe in, and the lives that we fight for, will persist through it all.”

The album, which clocks in at just over 23 minutes, boasts ten massive hardcore punk tracks, including lead single “Peace as a Punchline” and a pair of one-minute heaters in the follow-up singles “Out Loud” and “Mind to the Mirror.” 

The Love fittingly opens with a heartbeat and brief synthesizer moment on “Destiny Song” (later revisited in the outro of closing track “Don’t Lose Control”), with Madonna soon blasting off into a hooky anthem about communal destiny: “I’m bound to you, you’re bound to me, baby, we’re bound by destiny.”

The album was recorded with Taylor Young at Pit Studios in the San Fernando Valley over the course of nine days in April. Madonna says the band came out of the studio with a “more hard-hardcore record” than the musicians “expected to make,” and listeners can easily feel that energy from one scathing track to the next.

“It’s kind of this thing about aggression and anger not having to be negative or reductive, and instead, anger and aggression can be productive,” she says. “And I was feeling that inspiration and [wanted] to put that into lyrics, but instill an urgent fashion, like putting some urgency to the positivity, and also some tough love.” 

Madonna adds that the album examines the concept of art’s survival. “What we do can never really die,” she says. “We will persist through it.” The band’s first album, Be My Vengeance, meanwhile, was geared toward an ethos of “when I’m gone, fight for me,” she says.

The songs inspire listeners to embrace their true identity, drawing from Madonna’s own experience as a trans woman. But while trans and queer empowerment are clear throughout her lyrics, Madonna wants her songs to appeal to everyone in the punk community, rather than just those with similar experiences.

“I think another big part that I try to dial in on is, [at] the shows that we play and the people in our lives, not everybody is queer or trans like I am,” Madonna notes. “So I also want it to be a message that can hit someone no matter what their identity or their experience in life is, because hardcore and punk and music like this has been the unifier for me with people from all walks of life. And so I want to keep that tradition going.”

Throughout the album, a spotlight shines on the importance of community and pulling others up. For example, in “Lookin’ for a Fight / Done Lookin’”:

Never saw a space for myself in the world before me

‘Til I grabbed a blade to cut it out where I was finally fitting

Don’t gotta ask for room for yourself

Take your own and make it more for everyone else

More tracks boldly call out societal issues in true punk fashion, and often without being too on the nose. “Spewing regurgitations of original sin, if that’s what you believe, then I’m not listening,” Madonna sings on “Fix.”

The record alludes to many of the complex and harrowing issues that our world faces today, though Madonna says she particularly looks up to writers who center timelessness in their work, which is another throughline on The Love.

“Whenever you zoom out of it, and when we get far enough away from this moment in history we’re experiencing now, those will still be important messages,” she says. “I think sometimes going too on the nose and just trying to take down figureheads can kind of shortchange the effects of the lyrics. Because, while it is really easy to be all engrossed by the actual names of things happening right now, I think it is important for music and art to have more of that timeless nature. So that’s my approach to it right now, at least, is the underlying issues that make it so it lasts beyond this moment.”

With its quick and jagged chord progressions, shreddy guitar solos and dynamic, pummeling tempo changes, The Love adds yet another great Denver release to the punk canon. If nothing else, it’s worth a thorough listen, even if just for a brief breath of fresh air in what can feel like a sick, dark world.

“As everything for people like me, and people of varying experiences, might be experiencing right now — from the violence and the powers that be taking things from us — I hope that maybe this can be just a little blip of hope and can help some people believe that they can persevere through it,” Madonna concludes. “Because we’re kind of all we’ve got, and all we can do is survive and keep our spaces.”

The Love releases via Convulse Records on October 17; you can pre-order it at convulserecords.com.