Street Eaters – Opaque [GOLD VINYL] – New LP

Oakland post-punk rockers Street Eaters' brand new studio album features seven tracks that thrum with both rage and redemption.

Since the band’s 2017 LP The Envoy, not only did they weather a global pandemic along with the rest of us, frontwoman Megan March also had a child. While becoming a mother was, as she puts it, “an incredible joy and opportunity to rewire emotional pathways and deep wounds,” it was also a reminder of her own childhood; March’s own mother was violently homophobic and eventually ejected Megan and her teenage sister — both queer — from their home. For March, childbirth was both a traumatizing and transformational experience. Ironically born on the Fourth of July, her baby immediately entered a world steeped in bureaucracy, as the hospital was so understaffed that Megan was neglected until the last moment, forced to endure an emergency C-section. “I was borderline dehumanized by the toxic, misogynistic nature of the American medical system and its focus on efficiency and profit before care,” she says. Appropriately, the record kicks off loud and jagged with lead single “Tempers,” which March says is about “being in isolation and not being sure what the future is going to be like, and how things will be when the storm is over.” In Krista Wright and Theo Garvey’s wild-eyed video for “Tempers”, Street Eaters absolutely destroy a hospital waiting room where no one ever gets helped

On Opaque co-founders Megan March (drummer/vocalist) and John No (bass/vocals) are joined by guitarist Joan Toledo since 2019, a refugee from transphobic family and government in Florida, former editor of Maximum Rocknroll Magazine and radical union organizer at City Lights Books in San Francisco. The new collection attempts to stitch up the bloody wounds of their past — a meditation on birth and death, excavated trauma, and trying to find steadfast kin in a world that’s becoming more and more splintered and cruel. It is almost like a body in the process of healing: messy, broken, beautiful, and nevertheless alive.

“Opaque is a record that gets deep into the stark and beautiful reality of growth and transition from trauma and loss,” says March. “What does it mean to wake up one day and realize you are living the way you have always demanded to live — yet with all those jagged piles of emotional, physical, and social/political baggage still slicing through the veil?” Still, the album isn’t just confrontational — it’s complicated. A grasping toward identity, understanding, a place in the world in the process of being curated. “It’s a transition into finding peace with the world — a resonant connection with community and chosen family, getting beyond a lot of the pain and hurt,” No says. “We're trying to suture up wounds at this point and create something that’s healthy.”