The Armed aren’t a typical hardcore-punk outfit. To begin with, they’ve tended to operate more like an art collective than a traditional band ever since forming in Detroit in 2009. And although punk, hardcore and even metalcore certainly inform their walls of noise, The Armed ultimately exist beyond category. For instance, the 2015 album Untitled is as raw and jarringly avant-garde as top-shelf noise-rock, and the 2021 opus Ultrapop is, as its title implies, awash in vivid melodic moves that somehow manage to bubble up from the record’s unholy alliance of battering-ram rhythms and ear-frying electronic textures.