Gareth Smith keeps a notebook for titles. Most come from books. The one for Alarm!’s second LP came from Josh Bivens’ Failure By Design, a book he heard Noam Chomsky reference in the documentary Requiem For the American Dream.
Bivens argues that the financial crashes of the last fifty years aren’t miscalculations, they’re policy choices. A system designed to fail while an elite minority at the top of the pyramid takes the gains. The 2008 bank bailout is the case study Gareth points to. Taxpayers covered the banks, the banks survived, the bonuses kept flowing in the billions. “Which is obviously completely fucked up,” he says.
As soon as he had the phrase, he knew it was the album. The rest of the band signed off straight away. The concept didn’t stay abstract. Gareth grew up in Corby, England, in a steel town his family worked in until the Tory government shut the works down in the early 80s. Liverpool got the same treatment.
The official term for what followed was “managed decline.” Underneath it, deals were happening at the top while thousands of people lost their jobs. The recent Netflix mini-series Toxic Town is based on Corby and what came after the closures. Gareth recommends watching it.
The record, he says, was mostly written by the time the title landed. It just paired well. The second LP came out angrier than the first, and the album title locked in the atmosphere.
The full stylistic range bleeds through this wild beast. Crust punk roots, the fury of 80s, 90s and 2000s hardcore, and stretches of emotional hardcore that recall the furious, heart-tearing records of my beloved Swedish hardcore band Meleeh and their intense 2007 album “Heartland”.
Alarm! came together in Stockholm in early 2023. Gareth, Jon Lindqvist on bass and Andy Henriksson on drums had been playing together in various projects for over twenty years, most prominently in Victims. Their own self-description leans dry: 75% Victims, 50% Outlast, 125% hardcore. Jon, who’d played bass in Nasum and Outlast before, picked it up again after years on guitar. The three of them booked Studio Ryssviken with their friend Linus Björklund and cut nine instrumental songs, figuring vocals would sort themselves out. The debut 12″ came out in summer 2024 through Armageddon, Dropdead’s label.
Then Henrik Lindqvist messaged Jon. He’d seen they were looking for a singer.
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Henrik and Jon hadn’t written together since Outlast went on hiatus around the late 90s.
That’s roughly 25 years between sessions. The Sjutum/Law and Order podcast ran a poll of close to 70 people in Sweden for the best Swedish hardcore LPs and 10″s, and Outlast got nominated. The hosts described the band as “youth crew/old school/whatever hardcore.” Henrik likes that line. “I still think we are heading down the same route, challenging norms and coming up with our own sound.”
He’d been out of bands since Damn You Daggers, which played two or three shows in 2009. He’d crossed paths with Gareth, Andy and Johan over the years at events, travelled together to Fluff-fest in 2009, knew they were solid. He didn’t know if his voice was what they wanted. He went over, they had coffee, played two songs. “And that was it.”
The first session back was, in his words, fun. “Finding my way back, feeling tense and totally like I never did anything else at the same time.” His writing has changed since the late 90s. Less wordy. More image-led. “I think the music is less formulaic nowadays, as well as the lyrics.”
The pull away from Victims‘ crust punk default came from two directions at once. Jon’s bass and Henrik’s voice. They didn’t plan it that way.
Gareth describes Jon as a bass player at heart who plays it like a guitar, less controlled and less “solid” than Johan was in Victims, which gave the sound a wild side. Jon brings melody into the bass too, Gareth thinks from his love of Dag Nasty and Gorilla Biscuits. With Jon out front, Gareth could sit his guitar behind it as a wall of sound. “I can’t play bass for shit!” he says, by way of explaining why they ended up a classic four-piece with one guitar.
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Henrik joining wasn’t on the cards. The rest of them figured he was done with bands. Once he was in, his vocals and lyrics pulled the sound further from Victims.
“Henrik is 100% hardcore. I’d be surprised if he even owned a crust punk record.” Henrik corrects the record: he owns Discharge’s “Why” and Defiance’s “No Future, No Hope.” But he grew up on Minor Threat, Gorilla Biscuits, Inside Out and Chain of Strength. “I’ve never been much for establishing and maintaining boundaries of genres, it’s boring, and I’ve never been in a more eclectic band than Alarm!”
He writes all the lyrics, and doesn’t separate personal from political. The songs carry resentments and anger he keeps tightly held the rest of the time, with references to Shakespeare and Billy Bragg dropped in around commentary about whether trying to change anything is still worth it. Asked what the rage is pointed at right now, in 2026, in Sweden, in his life, he lists it out.
The global impact of the recent wars. Sweden being pushed into NATO. The far right gaining ground. People losing sight of helping others. New mosquito species in Sweden carrying new diseases as the climate shifts.
Showing up at work and listening to the most arbitrary control freaks while filtering opinions from people who move from influencer to politician on a single career step.
“Knowing something is postmodernly framed as an opinion by default as long as it does not fit the bias we all chase. So I guess, at my lowest points I am angry with progress.” He thinks part of that might be fear of change. He also thinks the answer isn’t another mindfulness course at work, it’s looking at the system that keeps pushing for more.
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Nothing on the record scared him to write or made him cut a line. “It’s always a bit scary to put your thoughts out there, on display. I still find it hard to cut things, most lyrics are longer.”
The songs came fast once they had one. Jon wrote “Chaotic System” first, and Gareth treats it as the springboard. It’s the closest thing on the record to the debut, and you can hear it’s a Jon song in the bass melodies running through it. From there Gareth started writing a new song before each practice.
“Birds Still Sing” came early too, after he rediscovered some earlier Converge records. He kept sneaking one particular discordant chord into a few songs. He knew right away “Birds Still Sing” was the opener: full-on, angry, with a hook. He had verse and chorus, then he and Jon worked the ending out by jamming it in the practice room.
That was the pattern for most of the record. Gareth would bring a main idea, Jon would add the part that pushed it sideways. Henrik on the lyric: “I like the image of birds still singing even though humans are mad. To me it exemplifies how things in life can be given so much seriousness to just fade in a short time period.”
“A New Low” is one of Gareth’s favourites and one of the more different songs on the LP, lower tempo but still hard hitting. He wrote the music in five minutes at his day job.
He’s a social worker in Stockholm, helping find permanent housing for people social services define as chronically homeless. A drop-in centre runs creative activities for clients. A meeting cancelled when the client didn’t show up. He picked up the acoustic guitar that lives at the centre, and the song was there. The band had talked to Dave from Meryl Streek about doing vocals on it after meeting at a festival in Gdynia and hitting it off. Dave said yes initially, then his calendar disappeared into a tour that didn’t end. Henrik wrote vocals instead.
“Say My Piece” gave Henrik trouble in the writing. The chorus packs a lot of words. He built it around piece/peace and depth/debt, and let the wordplay drive the intensity. The song is about the shallowness of only looking out for yourself without registering how much everyone depends on everyone else.
“We Are All We Got” tries to sort out why people pick the convenient path while staring at endless possibilities. Henrik traces the lost focus and purpose to a world filtered through algorithms, and lands on the people in immediate proximity as the only honest answer. He brought in Ronnie from Hard Pass to close the song out, and the closing section nods to how chasing happiness might mean admitting eternal euphoria belongs in a utopia.
The upcoming Life Abuse split carries “Vulgar Display Of Nothing,” the album-title-as-Pantera-nod that turns out to hide a George Orwell reference in plain sight. The song is about being overloaded with opinions and recycled perspectives marketed as innovation. Henrik’s closing thought on that one: “Seriously though, go read a novel.”
The 15-song session was planned that way. After the debut, where they recorded the first nine songs they wrote, Gareth started thinking in terms of multiple releases. He’s always loved 7″ vinyl for punk and hardcore. They went back into Studio Ryssviken in late 2025 with Linus Björklund and cut 15 tracks in one go. Brad Boatright mastered at Audiosiege. Morgan Sorenson, aka See Machine, did the cover illustration.
“Failure By Design” is the first to land, out May 8, 2026 on De:Nihil Records. Two split 7″s follow: one with Malmö’s Hard Pass, one with Life Abuse out of the US. Mark from Life Abuse got in touch a long time ago, which got the split idea moving. Ronnie from Hard Pass used to drive Victims on tour, and the friendship’s been there for years. Between LPs, Alarm! also appeared on Quarantined Records’ “Greetings From Sweden Vol. 2″ compilation, and the four-song 7” EP “Heavy On The Heart” came out in 2025 through Svensk Hardcore Kultur.
Gareth puts the reason for any of this plainly. “Being our age and doing this ‘starting a band thing’ again for the hundredth time, if there is one reason for still doing this, it is simply to do creative stuff with friends. We’re not doing this hoping to make it big, or have a late bloomer career with the band, it’s just about doing what we love. And if anyone else likes it, then that’s a bonus. Although, to be fair, that’s been the case ever since we started playing in bands in our early teens.”
Upcoming shows: May 30 at Bakgården in Karlstad, July 17 at RIFF in Budapest, July 18 at S.A.W.A. Fest in Županja, Croatia.
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