Surrender the Weapon have only been around for about two years, but they walked in with a pact: no reruns of old projects, no comfort-zone rewrites. Everyone in the band has a past in other New Jersey outfits — For the Love Of, Agents of Man, Elements DEC, Man Destroyed Man, Strength 691 — and they talk about those histories with respect, but also with a sense that the point of this group is to move forward.
“We are just some older hardcore dudes that make new music not trying to do what we have already done in our previous endeavors,” they said. The comparisons they’ve been getting — Burn, Orange 9mm — are familiar enough to them, though they approach those touchpoints sideways rather than recreating templates.
Dan handles almost all of the writing. On this EP he wrote every guitar part, shaping the core structures before the rest of the band built around them. Larry usually waits until the music settles into place before diving into lyrics. Sometimes he works from fragments saved years back; other times it’s a fresh page.
Their previous self-titled EP came out nearly a year ago, self-released like this one, and the band frame these new songs as the clearest version yet of what they set out to do.
“Counterfeit” opens with the Burn influence right on the surface — not copied, more like using that dissonant, groove-leaning DNA as raw material. Dan mixes in shades of For the Love Of and even a bit of Meshuggah’s rhythmic discipline.
The theme is broad but sharply felt: the political climate, the way polarization scrapes everything down to its ugliest impulses.
Larry anchored the lyrics around a line he wrote more than four years ago: “They consume, they destroy, they lie & they steal.” It never fit in his previous band Man Destroyed Man, but it ended up steering this track. The message is less about pointing fingers and more about observing what happens when people drift into extremes.
“Actuality” is the EP’s most sprawling cut. It pulls from Strength 691, Vision, and even Queensrÿche — an odd mix on paper, but it lands naturally.
The song shifts through several phases without losing its footing, and the lyrics keep things deliberately open.
They’re written from the perspective of an all-powerful entity looking down at human behavior, questioning motives and decisions. Larry leaves the identity of that voice undefined, more concerned with the vantage point than the mythology behind it.
“The Pact” splits in two. The first half leans into Bad Brains, a shared favorite across the band. The outro is something else entirely: Dan wrote it as a small tribute to Michael Gibbons and AJ from Leeway, a band that everyone in Surrender the Weapon cites as essential. Larry matched that energy lyrically by nodding to Eddie Sutton.
But the heart of the song is more personal. It’s about his dog Oliver, who died in September 2024. He even slipped in a mnemonic — “Our Love Instilled Vibrations Eternally Resolved” — as a bridge phrase before the second chorus.
The lyrics reach past the specifics of one loss and aim at anyone who has watched something meaningful disappear. The ending lines may feel heavy, but Larry frames them as a quiet celebration rather than a lament.
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Like most of our under the radar featured artists, Surrender the Weapon aren’t chasing nostalgia, trends, or an easy tag.
They’re trying to document where they are now, shaped by everything they’ve done but not bound to it. The new EP is self-released, same as the first, and they’re blunt about what they want: for people to hear it.
“We would just like the music to be heard,” they said. Coverage helps, but the work speaks for itself — three songs built from long histories, written with the benefit of time and the refusal to repeat it.
