Brooklyn/Philadelphia post punk duo Pamphlets tear into insatiable greed and the moral rot of power on “Against the Forces of Nature,” a blistering, serrated-guitar eruption whose feverish urgency and impassioned performance introduce their debut album ‘Somewhere in Zacatecas’ with thrilling force.
Stream: “Against the Forces of Nature” – Pamphlets
At its core, the song is about moral collapse. How you can have it all but it will never be enough to satisfy the itch of power. And thus that constant pursuit will inevitably be your downfall.
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Greed is a hunger that never learns when it’s full.
Feed it money, status, admiration, power – whatever promises to finally satisfy – and the appetite only grows hungrier, until wanting more becomes its own kind of ruin.
Pamphlets make that downward spiral sound absolutely exhilarating on “Against the Forces of Nature,” a blistering, feverishly charged blast of post punk driven by serrated guitars, pounding drums, and a performance that threatens to fly apart under the force of its own conviction. The song barrels forward with barely contained fervor, its jagged riffs and shouted vocals giving moral collapse the pulse of an emergency unfolding in real time. Beneath all that combustible energy sits a ruthless question of appetite: How much can a person accumulate, consume, and chase before desire hollows them out completely? Fierce, visceral, and thrillingly alive, “Against the Forces of Nature” channels Pamphlets’ political fury into an electrifying warning about the endless hunger for more – and the destruction waiting at the end of the chase.
What a light you bring in
Moral compass
Moral compass
Acolyte
Hungry for the feeling
Get your fill in
Get your fill in
You fleshlight
I thought you liked to fit in
Lull your breathing
Lull your breathing
Unless you’d
rather you fill what’s left with gold
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Against the Forces of Nature,” the incendiary first single from Pamphlets’ forthcoming debut album Somewhere in Zacatecas. Due November 13, 2026 via Lost Future Records, the eleven-song record introduces the Brooklyn/Philadelphia outfit at their biggest, boldest, and most fully realized yet, expanding the driving post punk of their earlier work with multiple guitars, flashes of emo and shoegaze, and the restless intensity that has long powered their live shows.
Singer/guitarist Jeremy Marquez and bassist Ben Griffin have remained Pamphlets’ constants through several lineups over the past five-plus years, but Somewhere in Zacatecas marks the first collection they wrote entirely as a duo. Distance forced a different creative rhythm: With Marquez in New York and Griffin in Philadelphia, they built these songs virtually rather than hammering them out through rehearsal-room jams. The change gave them room to write with greater scale in mind, and “Against the Forces of Nature” wastes little time showing off the result. Producer Caleb Thomas, who helped shape their previous EP Cause//Effect (2025), returned for the album alongside producer, mixer, and mastering engineer Adam Cichocki, with Nathan Rodriguez on session drums and Thomas contributing synths and additional percussion.
For all its muscle, though, the song’s real target is rot from within.
“At its core, the song is about moral collapse,” Marquez tells Atwood Magazine. “How you can have it all, but it will never be enough to satisfy the itch of power. And thus that constant pursuit will inevitably be your downfall. With that in mind, I feel like the ‘forces of nature’ can be seen as the temptations of greed, lust, and any other vice of power.”
Pamphlets attack that idea with exhilarating ferocity. Guitars slash and churn while Rodriguez’s drums push the song forward with breathless force, giving Marquez little room to settle as his vocal grows increasingly heated. The whole performance has the tension of a wire pulled taut: Urgent, abrasive, and alive with conviction. Even at its most melodic, “Against the Forces of Nature” keeps its teeth bared.
The lyrics sharpen that agitation into accusation. Marquez opens with a “moral compass” already under scrutiny before appetite takes over: “Hungry for the feeling / Get your fill in.” Wealth soon becomes both fantasy and sickness. “Gatsby style livings” gives way to eyes fixed on the green light, a pointed invocation of The Great Gatsby’s unreachable promise, while the mirage itself eventually floods. By the time Marquez demands, “Why did you drown yourself in gold?” accumulation has ceased to resemble success at all. The image is grotesque because the excess is self-inflicted: The person chasing everything finally disappears beneath the weight of what they wanted.
Gatsby style livings
What’s your dreaming
But your eyes on the green light
Waiting til the time’s right
Too idyllic
Roll the bones
But you see it
Rains flooding your mirage
Calls for triage
And while you squander for names
That fury sits comfortably within a band that has always understood politics as lived experience rather than sermon.
Pamphlets’ songs wrestle with the instability and anxiety surrounding them, but Marquez is wary of reducing that impulse to slogans.
“We don’t wanna be overly preachy and so ‘you must act now!’ with politics,” he explains. “We all know we’re living in shitty times with shitty people in power. I think what resonates is the context of how we live and the subtle but constant reason we push back against the noise. And we try to convey that in our music. Existence is the best form of resistance.”
“Against the Forces of Nature” pushes back loudly. Its satire has bite, its guitars have bruising force, and its anger remains exhilarating because Pamphlets never sacrifice movement for message. Even the title carries the band’s irreverent streak. During the song’s early stages, Griffin was telling Marquez about the ordeal of getting his Ford Escape from South Carolina to Philadelphia – transmission trouble, transportation headaches, flooding – so Marquez jokingly christened their Logic file “A 2008 Ford Escape Against the Forces of Nature.” Griffin later informed him the car was actually a 2009. “Whatever, same thing,” Marquez recalls.
Your ford escape’s
Keyed and stabbed with a flat
In the arms of an angel I’m calling it
Bullshit
Sharpen your mind
‘Cause theres no sleeping
Right, so tell me
Why did you drown yourself in gold?
The joke stuck, but the phrase grew considerably darker around the song it came to name. Here, the “forces of nature” are internal appetites granted too much power, and Pamphlets meet them with a performance that sounds equally uncontrollable. Griffin calls the single “a perfect bridge” between Cause//Effect and the band’s next chapter, emphasizing its urgency and the central role of the drums; Marquez describes it as their attempt at “containing the newfound energy from Cause//Effect and refining it into something new.”
That refinement matters because Somewhere in Zacatecas arrives after a period when Pamphlets’ future was far from guaranteed.
Griffin admits he came away from their previous EP exhausted and, after moving to Philadelphia, was prepared to leave the band altogether. Writing again changed his mind.
“I’ll admit I was pretty gassed after our last EP and was ready to move on from the band after moving to Philly,” Griffin says. “I was skeptical about making this album, but once we wrote our first song I got energized and fell in love with writing and playing music again. Hopefully this album gives people a similar feeling that energizes them in a positive way.”
That renewed investment courses through the music. Pamphlets wrote Somewhere in Zacatecas with multiple guitarists in mind for the first time, deliberately reaching for a broader, heavier sound while preserving the short, fast-moving songs that Griffin considers central to their identity. Their palette now stretches through post punk, emo, shoegaze, indie, and garage rock; Marquez brings more Spanish into the record as well, continuing a personal process of reconnecting with his Latino roots through music. Across all those changes, the pair see the album as both a reintroduction and an arrival – the closest Pamphlets have come to expressing exactly who they are.
Marquez’s brother may have supplied its clearest emotional throughline: “There’s a theme of reclaiming something you lost before it’s gone for good.” In Griffin’s case, the album itself became part of that reclamation. In the songs, that instinct stretches outward toward identity, resistance, memory, and whatever remains worth rescuing from a world eager to consume it.
Which makes “Against the Forces of Nature” an ideal place to begin.
It’s furious without becoming joyless, political without flattening into polemic, and muscular enough to make its warning exhilarating. Pamphlets take greed’s endless appetite and answer it with an abundance of their own – bigger guitars, harder hits, sharper words, and the unmistakable electricity of two musicians rediscovering exactly why they wanted to make this noise together in the first place.
Atwood Magazine recently caught up with Pamphlets’ Jeremy Marquez and Ben Griffin to dig deeper into the band’s evolution, the unlikely Ford Escape behind “Against the Forces of Nature,” their expanding musical world, politics, identity, and the long road toward Somewhere in Zacatecas. Read our full conversation below, and stream “Against the Forces of Nature” exclusively on Atwood Magazine!
Greed may never learn when it’s full, but Pamphlets know exactly what to do with that hunger: Feed it to the guitars and let them roar.
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:: stream/purchase Somewhere in Zacatecas here ::
:: connect with Pamphlets here ::
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Stream: “Against the Forces of Nature” – Pamphlets
A CONVERSATION WITH PAMPHLETS
Atwood Magazine: Pamphlets, hello and thank you for your time! For those who are just discovering you today, what do you want them to know about the band and your music?
Ben Griffin: Hello! Thanks for having us on the mag. We’ve gone through a few lineups over the years, but the one constant has been the two of us, Jeremy and Ben. This is the first collection of tunes that we wrote solely as a duo so the intention of the music embodies what we’ve been trying to do since our inception.
Jeremy Marquez: Hey! Not much else to add except that we’re based in NYC and Philly!
With us being a few years into your career, can you recommend a couple deeper cuts or personal highlights from the Pamphlets catalog for Atwood’s crate-digging audience to sink their teeth into?
Jeremy Marquez: I feel like our first EP Flowers for All Occasions is a bit slept on. It’s probably us at our rawest still figuring out our sound, but you can hear glimpses of the tone and message that we lean on today.
Ben Griffin: I’m really proud of our cover of “Damaged Goods” by Gang of Four that we did a few years ago. We recorded the instruments in our rehearsal space with a couple SM58s and two daisy chained Focusrite interfaces. The vocals were done in our friend’s home office and my favorite part was Jeremy singing under a blanket to reduce the reverb in the room. Gang of Four is a huge influence for us and we played that cover live a bunch of times. It was fun getting to put our own spin on it and it probably deserves some more love.
Who are some of your musical north stars, and what are you most excited about the music you’re making now?
Jeremy Marquez: We’ve always had our Post Punk roots, but for this album we really challenged ourselves to go for a bigger sound. For me influences were across the board, from artists like… And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and Fiddlehead, to Juan Gabriel, VVV [Trippin’ you] and Kevin Dailey. What’s exciting is because we live in different cities we were forced to take in many different influences, genres, and cultures. Since we wrote everything virtually, it made us sit down contemplatively to write out parts instead of building songs off jams in our studio which we’ve done in the past. I think this kind of songwriting made us reflect and dig in on what drives us to make music in the best way possible.
Ben Griffin: We typically say Bloc Party, Protomartyr, Deeper, Ought, The Fall. Those will always be some of our favorites, but like Jeremy said we switched it up a bit for this record. When writing this album I was listening to a lot of Superdrag, Cloud Nothings, and Rival Schools (specifically their Pedals album). In the past we were always a 3 piece, but this is the first time we wrote with multiple guitarists in mind. These new songs sound bigger than anything we’ve done before so we added a new guitarist for our live set and I’m excited to share that added layer with our audience. It’s all about big riffs baby!
Your debut full-length Somewhere in Zacatecas arrives this winter. How do you feel this record introduces Pamphlets?
Ben Griffin: As I mentioned, this album prominently features multiple guitars. That new element is a great reintroduction to our sound. Hopefully this record showcases our versatility with elements of various genres like post punk, emo, shoegaze, indie, and garage rock. It also continues the statement of who we always have been and that’s a band with fast songs that don’t overstay their welcome. Plus we double down on our roots incorporating more lyrics in Spanish with some subtle (and not so subtle) political jabs.
Jeremy Marquez: I feel like this album is probably us at our most authentic selves while at the same time a sort of “new chapter” of Pamphlets. We tie in a lot of influences across the board. Really, we’re just playing the kind of stuff we listened to growing up while also calling attention to the events that have impacted us.
Your latest EP Cause//Effect ushered in a heavier sound and more sentimental lyricism for the band. How does Somewhere in Zacatecas build on that chapter?
Ben Griffin: Our producer/mixer, Caleb Thomas, was pivotal in landing the tone of that EP. We brought him back as a producer on this album so having that continuity really helped us build on what we did before.
Jeremy Marquez: Ditto on Caleb. Having him as our producer really helped shape our sound and tone. I think also Cause//Effect was very much a lightning in a bottle situation and weirdly a new turning point for us. We were in a sort of “fuck it” mindset. A lot was changing in our personal lives, and we kind of let it all out over the course of 4 days not really thinking anything would come out of it. Thankfully Ben Kaplan, owner of our label Lost Future, heard it and here we are. I think that sort of release in Cause//Effect needed to happen because it sort of rewired us to write Somewhere in Zacatecas. We brought that raw mentality and tension from Cause//Effect and reshaped it into something more tangible and thoughtful for SIZ.
Today we’re premiering “Against the Forces of Nature.” Why did this feel like the right first glimpse into the album?
Ben Griffin: To me this track is a perfect bridge from our last EP to this new album. Every aspect of the song is ardent and has a sense of urgency. Plus the drums are such a crucial part of the song so it’s a great showcase of how Jeremy and I wrote the drum parts to all of our tracks for the first time since our inception. Of course I have to mention our great friend Nate Rodriguez who recorded these drums with a masterful interpolation of what we wrote in our demos.
Jeremy Marquez: Agreed, this is probably the best example of us containing the newfound energy from Cause//Effect and refining it into something new.
What’s the story behind “Against the Forces of Nature”?
Jeremy Marquez: Well… we like making dumb song names for our demos (who doesn’t). When we were first writing this, Ben was telling me about the BS he had to deal with to get his 2008 Ford Escape from South Carolina up to his spot in Philly. Transmission troubles, transpo, and eventually some flooding. So as a little joke I named the logic file we were working on as “A 2008 Ford Escape Against the Forces of Nature.” Later he told me it’s actually a 2009 Ford Escape but whatever, same thing.
I love how the song moves through moral collapse, money, mirage, and absurdity: “Gatsby style livings,” “your eyes on the green light,” and “why did you drown yourself in gold?” In this context, what are the forces of nature we’re going against?
Jeremy Marquez: You really nailed the message on its head! At its core, the song is about moral collapse. How you can have it all but it will never be enough to satisfy the itch of power. And thus that constant pursuit will inevitably be your downfall. With that in mind, I feel like the ‘forces of nature’ can be seen as the temptations of greed, lust, and any other vice of power.
Jeremy, you sing in both English and Spanish, sometimes within the same song. What does that fluidity mean for Pamphlets?
Jeremy Marquez: I do, rather poorly but I’m trying! I’ll be the first to admit my Spanish is more Spanglish than anything and sung in a pocho accent, but (as cheesy as it sounds) music is the only way I’ve been able to reconnect with my roots and learn. I’m Latino and originally from San Diego but I was raised in a predominantly white neighborhood in Denver. And so it was hard for me to be proud of my heritage for the longest amount of time. It wasn’t until I got more involved with music and bands that things started clicking. I have to shout out our homies in Los Shadows, as they were pivotal in introducing me to sing in Spanish. Ben has always been encouraging with adding some Spanish in our songs too, which has been helpful. For Pamphlets, that fluidity is sort of a testament of who we are. Singing in broken Spanish shows in our own weird way where we come from and how much we’re willing to hold that.
Pamphlets has been described as an unabashedly political call to action, with songs that speak to the chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety of the current moment. How do you think about politics inside your music?
Jeremy Marquez: We don’t wanna be overly preachy and so “you must act now!” with politics. We all know we’re living in shitty times with shitty people in power. I think what resonates is the context of how we live and the subtle but constant reason we push back against the noise. And we try to convey that in our music. Existence is the best form of resistance.
What do you hope listeners take away from “Against the Forces of Nature” and Somewhere in Zacatecas, and what have you taken away from creating this music and now putting it out?
Ben Griffin: I’ll admit I was pretty gassed after our last EP and was ready to move on from the band after moving to Philly. I was skeptical about making this album, but once we wrote our first song I got energized and fell in love with writing and playing music again. Hopefully this album gives people a similar feeling that energizes them in a positive way.
Jeremy Marquez: I hope listeners will first off like “Against the Forces of Nature” and pick up on the message. Regarding the album, my brother put it in a good way. He said, “There’s a theme of reclaiming something you lost before it’s gone for good.” I hope that is something that will resonate.
In the spirit of paying it forward, who are you listening to these days that you’d recommend to our readers?
Jeremy Marquez: Destiny Bond, Cherished, and Replica City are our Denver homies you gotta listen to and who I take massive inspiration from. Locally in NYC, I gotta shout out the homies in CS Cleaners (who just released an insane album) , Cortez, Too (who also just released a string of singles) and our long time buds in Balloon Snake.
Ben Griffin: We also need to shout out our good friends from Richmond, Tentative Decisions. I remember playing one of their songs for my uncle and he thought they were us. So if you dig Pamphlets you’ll love them. Some Philly brethren that deserve more love are GRE/AY and Glitterspitter. GRE/AY are loud and heavy heavy heavy in the best way possible. Glitterspitter is the exact opposite of that, but just as brilliant. We love them so much that we added a little nod to them on our upcoming album!
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:: stream/purchase Somewhere in Zacatecas here ::
:: connect with Pamphlets here ::
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Stream: “Against the Forces of Nature” – Pamphlets
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