Get ready to stomp your feet in the pit and raise your fists in the air, Canadian political punks, Propagandhi have just announced a run of shows across Australia... and New Zealand!

The first thing to know, if you want to know about Propagandhi, is that they came here to rock. Right from the snarling opening riff of their seventh album, Victory Lap, that much is clear. For everything else that swirls around the band now, and for the last 31 years — the politics, the people and, lately, a gnawing sense of despair — the sheer volume of it all hasn’t changed.

So even though Victory Lap was written while the world spun into darkness, it finds Propagandhi close to how they began: a ferocious band from a wind-battered Canadian prairie, thrashing out jams in a city erected on stole indigenous land.

This is a band that has always been fiercely political, that never backed down from calls for justice. Yet the events of 2016 still left them reeling, facing a landscape in which fascism is among a certain crowd, suddenly trendy.

So what do you do when you’re an unapologetically political band in a time when political speech seems more fractured than it has been in years? When the darkness looms and the rapacious maws of power seem to devour more by the day? You can’t stop the violence; you can’t save the world. But neither can you stand to sit back, and just watch it all burn. So here’s what you do: you strap up a guitar and get ready to rock.

Propagandhi