Workers Comp - Workers Comp LP (Ever/Never)

Workers Comp’s self-titled LP, released by New York based label Ever/Never, is a deconstruction of the American working-class mythos, reframed through the lens of punk irreverence and existential weariness. It’s an album that strips away the nostalgia often associated with Americana, presenting instead a stark, unflinching portrait of labor as alienation. If traditional Americana is about the promise of the open road and the dignity of hard work, Workers Comp asks a more pressing question: what happens when the road dead-ends, and work is little more than exploitation dressed up as survival?

This record truly channels the DIY ethos of punk not only in its lo-fi production and rough edges but in its thematic core - a rejection of the sanitized narratives that valorize work while ignoring its inherent violence. The trio - Ryan McKeever, Luke Reddick, and Joshua Gillis - construct their songs like workers on an assembly line, but instead of building something for profit, they tear down the myths that prop up the system. There’s no triumph here, no grand epiphany, just a bitter acknowledgement that the struggle itself might be the only thing left worth holding on to.

The album doesn’t just reject the narrative of work-as-redemption; it actively mocks it. The music is rough around the edges, not as a stylistic choice, but as a reflection of the themes it grapples with. Workers Comp refuses to offer clean, digestible resolutions. Instead, it presents labor as a form of time theft, a Sisyphean ordeal where even escape is commodified, and leisure becomes another product sold back to the workers who are perpetually caught in its grind.

If punk has always been about rejecting authority, Workers Comp pushes this further by challenging the very idea of what authority even is in a post-capitalist world. It's not just about flipping off the system; it’s about confronting the uncomfortable truth that the system has long since moved past caring whether or not we resist. There’s no catharsis here, no rallying cry for revolution, just a cold beer at the end of the shift and the creeping suspicion that tomorrow will look exactly the same.

In that sense, this LP is not just a critique - it’s a mirror. A distorted, cracked mirror, but a reflection nonetheless of the precarious conditions that define working-class existence today. It’s a punk record not because of its sound but because of its refusal to lie, its insistence on showing us the reality beneath the myth. Workers Comp might not fix the system, but it will sit beside you, pouring another drink as you both stare blankly into the abyss of the modern workday.