Today Damon Locks — the Chicago-based visual artist, educator, musician, deejay, and vocalist who is known as the voice of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, former frontman of legendary punk band Trenchmouth, and leader of latter day liberation music collective Black Monument Ensemble — announces a new solo album titled List of Demands, out January 31st, 2025, via International Anthem. The album’s lead single “Click” is available on all digital music platforms today. Listen to “Click” and preorder List of Demands here.

List of Demands marks Locks’ first foray into creating an entire album based off of his poetry and texts; but the signature collage work heard in his recent New Future City Radio and ongoing Black Monument Ensemble output is distinctly present in this new 12-song cycle of bite-sized Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style rhythm experiments.

The album’s sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal participation in the culture. Locks’ decades-long resume connects the dots between experimental improvisation, sample based hip hop, punk, and poetry — each done at the highest level and with a list of collaborators that could spin the head of even the most jaded listener. With his sheer presence as a communal hub himself, Locks has repeatedly demonstrated his capacity to jump-start an entire personality spectrum into action. With List of Demands he does just that, again, projecting an ecstatic positivity via his nuanced grasp of reality, and lucidly articulating the ever-evasive concept of what could be.

The album was set in motion when Locks was asked by Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) to present a new sound piece inside an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. After the show, ESS’s Alex Inglizian encouraged Locks to expand upon and record the music, and volunteered to engineer the sessions. Locks used the opportunity to invite some regular collaborators to contribute, including cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, violinist Macie Stewart, poet Krista Franklin, and turntablist / drummer Ralph Darden (aka DJ Major Taylor). Even with the additional voices, though, the resulting record is distinctly Damon Locks. List of Demands is arguably the most Damon Locks Damon Locks record to date, with his depth of experience as a mic controller on full display, as his voice soars above a strikingly melodic cadence of carefully chosen archival samples.

The title, List of Demands, is influenced by Locks’ work in Stateville Correctional Center with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. “In the summer of 2023 I taught a class where we developed a document that stated the desires of the incarcerated artists in the group,” he says. The group spent a summer session creating what would become the Artist Constitution, a document in which their beliefs, aspirations, and demands could be compiled, which would in turn be distributed outside the prison walls. A poster of that document is included in the vinyl edition of List of Demands.

“List of Demands is not just my list,” says Locks. “The list is in conveyance, in response, and in honor of all of those great Black speakers that turned a phrase to generate movement and change. It owes as much to Rammellzee, Fred Moten and Sun Ra’s oratory excellence as it does to Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, to Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson (across the pond), to Ruby Dee’s spoken recordings, and to others too numerous to mention.” 

Read Locks’ full album liner notes along with the lyrics here.