Against Me! – Shape Shift With Me (2xLP)

Recorded, mixed and engineered by Marc Jacob Hudson (Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day) at Rancho Recordo, 2016's Shape Shift With Me, Against Me!'s seventh full length album, has the distinction of being the first album frontwoman Laura Jane Grace truly wrote from the heart, with no metaphorical cloaks cast over the lyrics. It's an album about love, that deceptively complex emotion we all struggle with yet somehow eluded most of Grace's songwriting for the previous 20 years.

"Tons of people have written about love. But while love is cliché, it's infinitely relevant," Grace says. "For me, having always been in a punk band that was expected to be political, I never felt like I had that option to write about feelings in that way. That's what I ended up being drawn to this time. It's writing in a way I thought I could never write before, and not giving a shit about expectations." As such, Shape Shift With Me is a loose concept album about traveling the world and falling in and out of love, with Grace serving as the narrator. But even though she was opening herself up to new songwriting topics, she knew what her mission was from the start.

"Is there a record that is about relationships from a trans perspective?" she asks. "There needs to be more records about trans rights and everything like that, but feeling like I already did that, I wanted to move on to write commentary on living from a trans perspective. I wanted to write the transgender response to the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St., Liz Phair's Exile In Guyville and the Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free. All those records are relationship records. There's been an infinite amount of records talking about what love means from a cisgender perspective. I wanted to present the trans perspective on sex, love and heartbreak."

With Grace's new motivation came a new outlook on the band, as well. Previous albums found the songwriting process to be a largely solitary experience, but she embraced the spirit of collaboration for Shape Shift With Me – so much so that when Cody Votolato of the Blood Brothers sent her some demos of songs he was working on for another project, she became inspired and ended up co-writing "Boyfriend" and "Norse Truth," two of the album's most memorable tracks, with him.

In a career already full of classic punk records, Shape Shift With Me feels like the definitive Against Me! album – it's poppy and catchy ("Rebecca," "Suicide Bomber"), aggressive and in-your-face ("ProVision L-3," "Dead Rats"), sentimental and longing ("Crash," "All This (And More"). Moreover, it's the culmination of four years of existence as Laura Jane Grace – there's no going back now, so she might as well embrace it.

Colored vinyl 2LP pressing packaged in a widespine jacket.