Rough Francis Return With Their Most Punk Album to Date

Rough Francis Credit: Courtesy of Gunars Elmuts

As the first Trump administration prepared to take office in the final days of 2016, former Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins didn’t have much sympathy for defeatist talk.

“This is not a time to be dismayed,” Rollins wrote on social media. “This is punk rock time. This is what Joe Strummer trained you for.”

While many politicians tried to downplay the authoritarian overtones of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric — or made use of outrage to fundraise — Rollins’ invocation of Strummer and the Clash was the first piece of advice that felt genuinely inspiring to me.

With Trump back in the Oval Office, I’ve been waiting to see the artistic response, particularly within the punk scene. And while Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong has been talking shit to Elon Musk at every turn, I was hoping for something more substantial than social media insults lobbed at broligarchs who own most of those platforms anyway.

Silly me, I almost forgot that we happen to have a world-class punk band right here in Vermont: Rough Francis. The four-piece consists of brothers Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian Hackney — the scions of influential Detroit proto-punk rockers Death — and bassist Tyler Bolles, who joined in 2021. Though Rough Francis formed in 2008 to pay tribute to the band started by their father, Bobby Hackney Sr., the group soon evolved into a powerful punk-rock act of its own, releasing the four-song EP Introducing Rough Francis in 2010.

Fifteen years later, the band is dropping another four-song EP. Fall EP comes out this Friday, February 21, followed by a release show that evening at the Higher Ground Showcase Lounge in South Burlington.

I’ve been listening to the EP for a few weeks now and can say it is easily the band’s most focused — and furious — recording. The hardcore-inspired album roars out of the gate with “Great to Be Alive” and doesn’t let up until final track “Moving Backwards.” The latter song features Bobby Jr. bellowing lyrics such as: “I refresh my feed, it’s 1953, no progress,” “Now the uterus is public property and men hold the key,” and “Too many Black kids getting shot by filthy cops.”

Fall EP by Rough Francis Credit: Courtesy

Rough Francis are pissed off, and Fall EP is both a howl of frustration and a call to action. According to Bobby, though, that fire isn’t just about the return of Trump.

“Sure, the current administration certainly has a lot to do with this,” said the band’s front man and lyricist, the eldest of the three brothers, as we sat down over coffee on a February day in Burlington.

“But to be honest, as a Black man in America, this is always how I’ve felt about things,” he said. “When you’re a marginalized person in the U.S., that’s sort of the norm. This country isn’t built for people like us, so there will always be that sort of outcry in the lyrics I write.”

Bobby learned a lot of those lessons growing up in Underhill. As one of the few Black kids, he grew accustomed to being something of an outcast at school. The song “Not a Nice Guy” on Rough Francis’ 2013 album, Maximum Soul Power, was his answer to those high school days.

“I had the idea for that song for a long, long time,” he told me. “There was so much closet racism towards me in school because I didn’t look like anybody else. It was hard to know who my real friends were, and it turns out it was the punks who would go to 242 with me — I could trust the punks and the skaters.”

Now defunct, 242 Main was the all-ages basement venue of Burlington’s Memorial Auditorium, established as a gathering place in the 1980s when Bernie Sanders was mayor. At the club, 14-year-old Bobby formed the rock band Goulash, the first of his many, many groups. (Seriously, if you have at least half an hour to kill, ask Bobby to list every band he’s been in. Bring a water bottle.)

At 242, he finally felt free from what he had experienced in high school — people acting like allies when in reality they were anything but.

“The situation in America right now reminds me of that,” he continued. “Apply it to corporations and rich people — they show their true colors in how they spend their money and who they don’t want to include in their plan.”

Those feelings hit close to home for Rough Francis in 2021, when they believed their bassist, Dan Davine — the only white member of the band at the time — had attended the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Davine has denied taking part in or even observing the riot, though he did attend the rally that preceded it.) The band immediately fired Davine.

The bassist’s departure gave Rough Francis a chance to reboot.

They brought in Bolles on bass, a skilled and versatile player with a list of Vermont bands on his résumé almost as long as Bobby’s. Bolles quickly formed a potent and dynamic rhythm section with Urian, a world-class drummer who tours with Iggy Pop, as well as Detroit post-hardcore act the Armed.

With a new lineup in place, the band decided to try something different with its sound, something more direct and heavier. Though he’s still happy with Rough Francis’ earlier catalog, Bobby acknowledged that, stylistically, it was all over the place.

“We had a miniature identity crisis for a while,” he said. “Are we trying to sound like Death or the MC5? Are we trying to sound like a Detroit rock band, even though we’re punk rockers from Vermont?”

The band eventually came to the conclusion that it was time to display its own influences — namely the D.C. 1980s hardcore punk scene and bands such as Minor Threat, Bad Brains and State of Alert that they had grown up listening to. Highly political and full of fury, D.C. hardcore music was marked by its straightforward, no-frills sound and “Fuck the man” ethos. That kind of stripped-back, less-is-more approach intrigued Bobby and his bandmates, who made a concerted effort to craft a proper hardcore record in Fall EP, which they tracked at Urian’s Burlington studio, the Box.

“It’s our love letter to punk and hardcore,” Bobby said. “We reference other stuff, too; there’s some Joy Division in there. But mainly, we just really wanted that dark, tight, no-bullshit sound.”

Fall EP has that in spades. Though the original lineup included two guitarists, these days Julian is the sole six-stringer. He makes ace use of all the newfound space, layering the record with savage riffs; his distorted power chords drive songs such as “Summer Sun.” Urian and Bolles are locked in and as tight as a turning set of gears, and Bobby’s bellow sounds bigger than ever as he sings the most ferocious lyrics of his decades-long career.

To properly celebrate the release of the new EP, the band booked a show at Higher Ground that Bobby feels is a “statement,” featuring fellow Vermont punk bands Blossom, Violet Crimes and DJ Collin HaGOOD.

“We’ve got a mostly Black punk band, a trans/queer hardcore band in Blossom, and Violet Crimes has these really, really politically charged lyrics,” Bobby said. “It’s going to be a good space for people to be with other people and feel seen and heard. We want people to know that Rough Francis is with them.”

Word to the wise: The band isn’t looking at touring in support of the EP until sometime in the fall, so if you want to see it live, this is the show. Judging by the first month and a half of 2025, we’re all going to need a lot more punk music in our lives. This is what Joe Strummer trained us for.

Eye on the Scene

Last week’s live music highlights from photographer Luke Awtry

Jon Fishman performing with Pork Tornado Credit: Luke Awtry

Celebrating Sergei: An Analog Outpouring, Nectar’s, Burlington, Saturday, February 15: Not even a nor’easter could keep the Burlington music scene from paying its respects to beloved Burlington sound engineer Sergei Ushakov, who died last month. If anything, the weekend’s blizzard offered a fitting backdrop to say goodbye to the notoriously frosty Russian. Indeed, the turnout for the star-studded Celebrating Sergei: An Analog Outpouring at Nectar’s on Saturday was heartwarming. Both floors of the nightclub were filled with folks who braved the elements to toast the man who never stopped pushing musicians beyond their limits — while sometimes also challenging the upper decibel limits of audiences’ noise tolerance. Rachel Bischoff, a local drummer, sound engineer and close friend of Ushakov, ran the sound board for Pork Tornado and the Grippo Funk Band, and yes, it was loud enough to hear the music from the street — just as Ushakov would have wanted.