“Sister Wife Sex Change”

Sister Wife Sex Strike

Quinn McClurg

I don’t care if you don’t like folk, punk, or folk punk—you need to listen to this album’s first track—hear the discordant cries of 24 different punks screaming nationwide in unison: “IT’S TIME FOR A SEX CHANGE!”

Ever since their very real sex strike in 2021, Sister Wife Sex Strike (SWSS) has ignited folk punk undercurrents at an unprecedented speed, perhaps due to their TikToks and extraordinary networking skills. The duo is very trans, anarchic, inviting, and vocal, using their platform to support folks fighting for decolonization everywhere.

Released in June, SWSS’s newest album, “Sister Wife Sex Change” is perfectly poised for both the season of fall and the fall of every empire: its thrashing, folkloric instrumentation and desperate, yet confrontational lyrics scream its listeners to action. 

From “Mind Breaks” to “Relapse,” the album warns how cycles of violence are weaponized by the power-corrupted, but also how the people’s struggle against colonization must always be taken up. The lyricism peaks in “From the River to the Sea”: 

I've walked on mountains, I've walked over graves / I've stepped in rivers that bear the wrong name / And now I see the same old tale taking a new shape… Poison in my father's blood is now running in me / It's about damn time we kill these ghosts / From the river to the sea.

Continuing to “Dust,” the album’s theme of large-scale revolt is realized, surging and singing to accordion and fiddle-song—until every hero is cut low by kings. 

The album spirals hopefully for the last time in traditional “Dortn” before throwing itself at the feet of an expectant salvation. Afterward, all that’s left is the emptiness of transformation and the gnawing of “Something older than time.” 

Cathartic, speculative, and radical, SWSS never fails to disappoint.