“We stand for something more than a faded sticker on a skateboard”: Every Propagandhi album ranked from worst to best

Propagandhi hate the idea of ‘the scene’. After being co-founded by singer/guitarist Chris Hannah and drummer Jord Samolesky when the pair were high-school teens, they quickly grew sick of the punk rock confines around them and sought to spread their wings. That refusal to conform has resulted in a peerless, near-40-year career, their back-catalogue brimming with hardcore/heavy metal opuses and their lyrics unafraid of anything – even pissing off their own audience. Following the release of At Peace, their first album in eight years, here’s every entry in the Canadians’ discography ranked in reverse-order of excellence.

8) How To Clean Everything (1993)

Propagandhi are at their best when mixing punk’s lack of fuck-giving with metal’s force and technicality. On their debut album, released by NOFX bassist Fat Mike’s Fat Wreck Chords, they were years away from nailing that balance. Chris Hannah has lambasted How To Clean Everything as “a goofy, skippy, cartoonish, laughable, Blink-182-ish kind of record”, and although its skate punk simplicity was a far cry from the band’s latter-day output, the lyrics showed sparks of their later wit and antagonism. “We stand for something more than a faded sticker on a skateboard,” Hannah howled on Anti-Manifesto. Indeed they do.

7) Less Talk, More Rock (1996)

After the success of How To Clean Everything, Propagandhi’s shows were populated with the type of jocks and meatheads they openly hated. So, for album two, the band doubled down on their political messaging, slapping the words “animal-friendly / gay-positive / anti-fascist / pro-feminist” onto the cover. The title track was an outright parody of head-in-the-sand rock’n’roll, with Hannah admitting atop hop-along drum beats, “We wrote this song ’cause it’s fucking boring.” As wrong as it feels to rank an album this principled this low, Less Talk… was Propagandhi’s last proper punk effort, and the material afterwards was what truly signposted them as a singular band.

6) Victory Lap (2017)

With 2012’s Failed States, Propagandhi made the most metal album of their career, and its follow-up represented both a step forward and a backwards glance. The likes of the title track and Lower Order continued the precise yet primal stampede of recent works, whereas Failed Imagineer hearkened back to the band’s punk rock roots. Because of this, Victory Lap wasn’t as musically congruent as its predecessor, but Hannah’s lyricism stayed on point, narrating personal experiences while also wanting to be a conduit for Black and Indigenous perspectives. Even with a proto-fascist, Trump-ian America south of the border, Propagandhi were not scared to be heard.

Propagandhi - "Failed Imagineer" - YouTube

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5) Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes (2001)

In 1997, bassist Todd Kowalski joined the band. Described by Chris Hannah as someone who “pushes us to make songs that would otherwise be fairly standard” and often sighted in Nervosa and Death hoodies, he encouraged Propagandhi to pursue their avant-garde and metal influences. The early result of that was Today’s Empires…. Album three contained enduring fan-favourites such as Back To The Motor League and took no prisoners with the booming chords and screaming vocals of Fuck The Border. Rightfully revered as a classic, the only thing keeping it mid-table is the fact that the band continued to improve as the years rolled by.

4) Supporting Caste (2009)

Propagandhi’s first album as a four-piece remains their most intricate. Joined by now-former guitarist David “The Beaver” Guillas, they loaded Supporting Caste with riffs and lead lines, making such standouts as Incalculable Effects and Tertium Non Datur able to rival any thrash metal track in terms of bile and energy. The songs also felt more personal than they had in some time, touching on the band’s veganism with Potemkin City Limits and using a love for hockey to savage nationalism on Dear Coach’s Corner. More Rush than D.O.A., this was another evolutionary statement from one of punk’s most restless bands.

3) At Peace (2025)

Propagandhi ended an eight-year dry spell with a switched-on manifesto for 2025. At Peace had its introspective moments, including a conflicted title track and the lamentation of aging that was No Longer Young, while keeping its other eye on current issues and dissecting them with poetic insight. Benito’s Earlier Work highlighted the way fascist dictatorships begin and their inevitable, bloody ends, and Vampires Are Real waded into pervasive incel culture. Slower than past releases, the album was laden with head-bobbing riffs from Hannah and Sulynn Hago, making for a perfect, anthemic metal album for the present day.

2) Failed States (2012)

Guillas’ last Propagandhi effort before he stepped down to become a teacher, Failed States saw the band truly lock in as a four-piece, turning Supporting Caste’s wackier edges into a full-throttle metal attack. From grooving opener Note To Self, this was (and remains) Propagandhi’s heaviest, darkest album, using the emergence of social media and conspiracies around the Large Hadron Collider to paint a truly dystopian portrait of the world. Chris Hannah was also at his angriest here, snarling during the title track, “29 years in human history: the total duration of time without war. What the fuck am I acting so surprised for?”

1) Potemkin City Limits (2005)

Everything that makes Propagandhi special – the heaviness, poetic lyrics, technicality, aggression and attitude – was present and evenly distributed on Potemkin City Limits. The band’s fourth album was a commercial flop, but for connoisseurs it became the measuring stick against which all future releases were judged. Surveilling the disarray of a post-9/11 North America, A Speculative Fiction imagined an Iraq War-esque conflict between Canada and the USA, underscoring its narrative with a punk/metal frenzy. It was an apropos start to 12 songs of sharp hooks, powerhouse riffing and political punch, with everything from the president to punk rock itself getting black eyes. Musically and conceptually, Potemkin… was what Propagandhi had spent the past 19 years building up to, and it stands up today as a masterpiece of protest art.