Low, heavy bass under blunt drums, with a guitar cutting angular lines across the top: that is roughly the shape of Wealthy Women, and on their debut album the band gave the shape a rule. The heavier the subject, the further the tunings drop to meet it.
The San Francisco trio are not built the way you might expect a Bay Area band to be built. Don Doblados, on bass, is the Bay Area-born son of Filipino immigrants. Andrew Harms, on drums, came from Kansas. Peter Sisk, the guitarist, singer and chief songwriter, is Irish and only moved to the US in 2017, arriving in the earliest months of the first Trump administration and watching the country change around him ever since. That outsider vantage runs through everything on “Children“.
The band formed in 2024 and spent the following year writing and recording the album at Antisleep Audio with producer Scott Evans. Written largely in the wake of Trump’s re-election and shaped by the despair that built through 2025, its eight tracks circle the crises of the moment: toxic masculinity and the online radicalisation of young men, the human cost of cruel immigration policy, and the casual inhumanity of modern war.
“We’ve been working towards this for quite a while; the album was written and recorded during 2025 and the themes of that year definitely form a huge part of it,” the band say. “Since then the band has been focused on touring and we’ve been really enthused by the reaction to the songs live. We’re excited to share them with a wider audience.”
The record does not stay in one register. It moves between outrage and grief, with satire and dark humour used to break up the weight. “37 Days” tells the story of Asaad al-Nasasra, and it plays out from inside a detention that never lets up: “37 days / Holding by my fingernails / I’ll tell you things that just aren’t true.” By the end it hardens into something closer to a stand than a lament: “We will resist you / This land is ours too.”
“Take It Back” follows a woman who backed harsh immigration policy right up until the machinery closes on her too, the lyric naming Project 2025 by the time she ends up “Imprisoned / In foreign lands.” “Siege”, written in late 2024, describes Trump’s second term with a prescience that still stings.
Then there is “Shit Breaks“, which is where the record goes quietest and lowest. It is an account of spousal abuse written from inside the abuser’s own excuses, and Peter sings it flat and close: “I’m not a bad guy / I get confused.” The chorus keeps circling back to the line that gives the song its horror, “It doesn’t matter what I’ve done to you.”
That is the range the album covers, and the band cover it at more than one speed. “Shit Breaks” walks slowly and sits at the bottom of the tuning. “Men of the West” holds a middle tempo. Elsewhere the songs push harder and faster. Through all of it Peter sings in plain, legible language, closer to speech than to the abstraction most bands in their corner reach for, which becomes its own statement on two songs sitting side by side in the middle of the record.
“Atheist Wife” and “Worst Date” are paired together, live and on the album, and both deal with the right’s view of women and how it fed into the 2024 election. “Worst Date” is written from the perspective of a fictional San Francisco crypto enthusiast steeped in the kind of Manosphere culture that was riding high in early 2025, when the sense was that young men’s swing to the right had been a big part of the Republican victory, and that their dissatisfaction with the growing role of women in society was partly to blame.
The song opens inside the protagonist’s head. As the doomed date unravels, those inner thoughts spill out into the open. The Manosphere he has absorbed treats everything between the sexes as a transaction, women offering comfort and nurture in exchange for money and protection, so he sees no conflict in folding a sales pitch into the search for a partner.
When his view collides with reality he turns, and the second half slides into a grievance-laden crypto-rant: “There’s room for you in my seed round / And maybe my bed,” he offers early, before it curdles into “I’ll show you how to be a man / The ladies in your life will thank you / There’s a gel for that / 99.99.”
During recording the band had a long conversation about how it would land. “It’s atypical for bands in our niche to have such legible and uncomfortably direct lyrics and vocal delivery,” they say. Employing satire, and narrating the motives of a reprehensible subject without stepping in to comment, is uncommon in their corner. In the end they left the judgement to the listener. They had played the song live at a handful of shows and been encouraged by the reaction from the crowd. “At some point we decided we had to have trust in the listener,” the band say.
“Atheist Wife” came together musically two weeks before recording began, with the lyrics written overnight the day before the vocals were tracked. It takes the Vice President’s faintly ludicrous attack on “childless cat ladies” as a starting point, turning it into an expression of the band’s bemusement that the very things they admire in the women around them could become the basis for “visceral hatred from the people running the country in our name.”
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“We see these women being kinder, stronger and more competent than the men in the White House every day.” The lyric lands it plainly, “She’d make a better vice president,” before turning the question back on the haters: “Why do you despise my atheist wife / She’s nice / You’re scared / You’re scared to be alone up there.”
When it came to sequencing, the two songs became a counterpoint. “Atheist Wife” plants the band’s position on feminism clearly before “Worst Date” walks the listener into the Manosphere, and they use the same order live to frame a first-time listener before handing them the satire.
<– ATHEIST WIFE VIDEO –>
“Men of the West” stands apart from all of it. Where the rest of “Children” pulls its horror from the present, this one reaches back to the deep past, a medieval siege told from inside the shield wall. It is the album’s most muscular track, mid-tempo and grinding, and the lyric holds the line as the bodies pile up: “Shields forward / Shields high / Death from the stab and the sky.” The refrain gives no way out, “You’ll never leave you can never retreat,” and the fight is over relics, “Defend the saint’s bones to the last.” It arrived as the album’s second single and video on May 8th. Watch it below.
The title track closes the record in mourning, this time for the children of Gaza and Ukraine. “Children” was mastered by Matthew J Barnhart at Chicago Mastering Service, with cover photo by Anastasiia Sapon.
Peter Sisk plays guitar and sings, Don Doblados plays bass, Andrew Harms plays drums. The album is out August 7th 2026, with the pre-order covering digital and 140g black vinyl.
“The themes of the album feel just as present in 2026 as they did last year,” the band say, “dealing as it does with war, the death of innocents and the assault on democracy.”
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