Destroy Boys

Artist Presale: 10/28 at 10am - 10/29 at 10pm
Public on Sale: 10/30 at 10am

Destroy Boys have partnered with PLUS1 to direct $1 from every ticket to local organizations expanding food access, supporting mutual aid, and protecting Indigenous lands. They’ve also teamed up with Concerted so fans can trade local volunteer hours in these cause areas for a limited number of tickets at each tour stop.

Destroy Boys

Destroy Boys’ fifth album FOIE GRAS was built out of a series of risks that ultimately produced the band’s most cohesive, ambitious, and best work yet. Those risks began with the title. Alexia Roditis (vocals/guitar), Violet Mayugba (backing vocals, guitar), Narsai Malik (drums), and David Orozco (bass) landed on FOIE GRAS while touring Europe, passing names around with the same openness that defined the making of the record. Eventually, Orozco suggested the name of the dish produced by force-feeding ducks until their livers swell. The metaphor was a gamble; so was the album. “Everything we did on this record are things that made us uncomfortable in the beginning,” Mayugba says. “Like, is this too poppy, or is this too weird?” Roditis adds.

The title came to encompass the record’s larger preoccupation with all the things being force-fed to us today—disinformation, screens, consumerism, the grind, political narratives, the expectation that we accept an increasingly untenable world as normal—and the possibility of refusing to comply. “You’re either the duck or the tube,” Mayugba explains.

Formed by Roditis and Mayugba when they were 15, Destroy Boys have spent the past decade turning their coming-of-age and growing political consciousness into whip-smart, punk-adjacent songs, while massively expanding the possibilities of the genre. They quickly gained a local following at DIY shows in Sacramento while they were still in high school, then expanded from house shows across the West Coast to an international audience through increasingly assured records and relentless touring, including support slots for Blink-182, Pierce the Veil, and Rise Against.

Mayugba describes Destroy Boys’ evolution as a caterpillar entering its pupa and emerging as a butterfly: “I feel like FOIE GRAS shows everything that we’ve always wanted Destroy Boys to be.” While their previous album, 2024’s Funeral Soundtrack #4, signaled the death of their adolescence, FOIE GRAS is the band’s true birth: the moment they fully embody the scale of their enormous ambition. “It was all we could think about. We only ate and slept just so we could keep on making this album,” says Mayugba.

Produced by Zach Tuch (Knocked Loose, Touché Amoré), the sessions were full of sweat and rigorous experimentation just as much as they were about play, as Tuch laughed at the band’s jokes while encouraging them to follow sounds wherever they led. “The chemistry we had in the studio was phenomenal,” says Malik.

Destroy Boys’ success has come in part by the yin and yang of their pop sensibilities and deep experimentalism, as Roditis and Mayugba approach the band from two contrasting angles. One of the risks on FOIE GRAS was fully leaning into the latter. There are grunge guitars, hardcore bursts, pop-punk chug, post-punk propulsion, Britpop chords, breakbeats, bossa nova, acoustic passages, and dreamier, almost jazz-like detours. Across the songs, there’s a constant teeter-totter between the personal and the political, too. A romantic relationship is figured as its own miniature political system; a personal crisis can suddenly widen into an inventory of everything broken in the world.

“Hysteria,” the first song they wrote for the album, turns a couple of hours of furious improvisation into a working-class revolt against a system that expects people to live on scraps. “Behavioral Euthanasia” rapidly catalogs the present’s accumulating catastrophes—AI, downsizing, and all the other indignities of contemporary life.

Then there is “Strings of Fate,” with its slow, washed-out, half-dreamy, half-jazz sound, and its fantasy of escape through other people, phones and crushes.The song was co-written extensively with Tuch and grew out of a demo that Mayugba had initially thrown away. Roditis had saved it, though, and months later brought it back, recording a vocal over the chorus. When Mayugba heard Roditis sing over it, she said she “fell to my knees”. “Alexia has this way of doing things with vocals that just reaches your soul.”

The rhythm-guitar chords from “Strings of Fate” eventually became “Be Regressive.” Here, Mayugba turns the familiar cheerleading chant—“Be aggressive, be, be aggressive”—and replaces those words with “regressive,” turning a cheer for action into something closer to the passive political mood of the present. The idea came to Mayugba in a co-writing session with Frank Iero (who contributes vocals on “Behavioral Euthanasia”), when the familiar chant came to mind. The song’s more conventional punk structure—breakdown, middle eight, release—makes the joke almost deceptively easy to swallow.

But FOIE GRAS isn’t interested in what goes down without effort; just the opposite. If the album’s title asks whether we are the duck or the tube, the record offers a third option: stop accepting the meal we’ve been served. Make something else.