Track By Track: Unsanitary Napkin's New Album 'All Billionaires Are Bastards'

Aotearoa punks Unsanitary Napkin's new album All Billionaires Are Bastards is out today, a powerful and deeply outraged twelve song collection from the explosive trio of Hannah (guitar and vocals), Ru (bass), and Ben (drums). Commenting directly on a range of urgent political issues and public figures (both reprehensible and inspiring), we asked Unsanitary Napkin for the first-hand lowdown on each track on the record, which they generously provided below. A rallying cry for "solidarity in resistance as we fight for a better world," educate your dome with their words on All Billionaires Are Bastards (plus read the album's accompanying essay HERE), out now digitally and on vinyl LP via Bandcamp — released in collaboration with Always Never Fun, Slimebag and Limbless, distributed overseas by Hardcore Victim (Aus) and Sorry State (US)...

TERF War

One of two songs we released last year in solidarity with our trans and gender-diverse whānau, and in opposition to the transphobic ideas taking root in New Zealand. Fuck transphobia!

All Billionaires Are Bastards

Peter Thiel is a bastard. Jeff Bezos is a bastard. Elon Musk is a bastard. Richard Branson is a bastard. Gina Rinehart is a bastard. We live within a system that incentivises people to accumulate wealth at the expense of all others. Their obscene wealth could feed millions of people if distributed – but they choose space tourism instead.

Dildo Baggins

This song is about social justice activist Josie Butler (national hero), who threw a dildo at Steven Joyce at Waitangi because she opposed New Zealand signing the TPP Agreement. We loved it, we have a huge amount of respect for her, and her activism.

Peter Thiel (Literal Fucking Vampire)

Peter Thiel is a billionaire bastard and genuine supervillain. He is a racist, sexist, Trump-supporting bastard. He also invested in “life-extending technology” companies using parabiosis, which is the process of extracting plasma from the blood of young people in an attempt to make rich old people live longer. He gets his own song.

Speak Up For Women, You Don’t Speak For Me

The second of two songs we released last year in solidarity with our trans and gender-diverse whānau, and in opposition to the transphobic ideas taking root in New Zealand. This song is specifically about Speak Up For Women and their relentless campaign of terror against trans people in Aotearoa. Fuck transphobia!

Love Hungry Punx (cover of The Johos)

This is a cover of one of our favourite New Zealand punk songs ever, Love Hungry Punx by our mates The Johos.

Carnage

Big Freedom

This song is about the weaponisation of the rhetoric around “freedom” by the alt-right, and how it’s used by people in power to silence marginalised groups and justify hate.

ACAB

Cops persecute and kill society’s most vulnerable with impunity. Law enforcement institutions embody systemic racism, sexism, transphobia and perpetuate the legacy of colonisation. Abolish, abolish for freedom! ACAB, all day, all the time.

Commodore Keating (Who Sees You Excreting)

Commodore Alfred Keating, New Zealand's former top military attache, was accused and found guilty of planting a hidden camera in a bathroom at the New Zealand embassy in Washington. A friend of ours alerted us to this story and encouraged us to write a song about it, for which we are eternally grateful.

Inert

This song is about increasing surveillance and data collection measures, and feelings of helplessness, anxiety and uncertainty about where that will lead.

Do They Owe Us A Living? (cover of Crass)

We love this song and we love Crass, but we rewrote some of the lyrics to be more relevant to Aotearoa. Instead of singing about blowing up your TV in 1978, the new verses are about the increasingly untenable socioeconomic situation in Aotearoa and the ongoing injustice of colonisation.<