Gen and the Degenerates Talk Debut Album ‘Anti-Fun Propaganda’

Genevieve Glynn-Reeves, the 22-year-old British singer and lead for Gen and the Degenerates, is not looking for sympathy from older generations. Just cutting back on the constant invective and contrived concerns will more than suffice.

“There’s so much criticism of like Gen Z and millennials from older generations about how we’re spending our time and the kind of things we value,” says Glynn-Reeves, who with her four bandmates — guitarists Sean Sloan and Jake Jones, bass player Jay Humphreys and drummer Evan Reeves — turn the tables on the naysayers on their debut album Anti-Fun Propaganda, out Friday (Feb. 23) on Marshall Records.

Through tracks like “Kids Wanna Dance” and “That’s Enough Internet for Today,” Gen and the Degenerates dissect the youth experience under the Internet bubble, where every momentary mistake and mishap is fed into an algorithm and archived in the cloud somewhere.

That’s disconcerting for Glynn-Reeves, who notes her dislike for permeance: “I don’t even write the lyrics for my songs down. If they aren’t good enough to be remembered, they probably should be forgotten.”

A native of Cambridge, Glynn-Reeves met her bandmates at Liverpool John Moore’s University in 2019 and has been honing the band’s sound ever since, landing on a punky ’80s UK-meets-Manhattan’s Lower East Side style with fast-paced lyrical delivery and dancy themes reminiscent of Blondie, The Eurythmics and Duran Duran.

As part of the album release, the band is featuring their newest single “Girls,” a cheeky anthem skewering the TikTok talking heads who criticize “girly behavior.”

“I asked women on TikTok and femme-presenting people for weird misogynistic complaints that their ex-boyfriends have had about them,” Glynn-Reeves says. “It turned out to be all these stupid things like, ‘Oh my ex would complain when I wore heels that made me taller than him,’ so I made the lyric ‘I love it when their shoes make them taller than me.’ Because it’s so ridiculous for men who claim to want to date women to then just have all of these stipulations and criticisms about women.”

“And they say this while having no standards for themselves,” Jones added.

“We should celebrate those things and put them in a positive light and see them as desirable,” Glynn-Reeve added. “As a queer person, I would love to date a woman like that; that sounds brilliant.”

Anti-Fun Propaganda is available in Spatial Audio via supported streaming platforms. The album can be found on Spotify here. Fans can purchase limited-edition vinyl bundles of the album here. The band is currently on the road with legendary Celtic punks Flogging Molly across the U.S. The complete list of dates can be found below.

Feb. 23 – Charles Town VA, Hollywood Casino Event Centre
Feb. 24 – Jim Thorpe NY, Penn’s Peak
Feb. 25 – Huntington NY, The Paramount
Feb. 27 – Winston-Salem NC, The Ramkat
Feb. 28 – Chattanooga TN, The Signal
March 1 – Nashville IN, Brown County Music Centre
March 2 – Madison, WI, The Sylvee
March 3 – Green Bay WI, EPIC Event Center Green Bay
March 5 – West Des Moines IA, Val Air Ballroom
March 6 – Davenport IA, Capitol Theatre
March 8 – Kansas City, MO, Uptown Theatre
March 9 – Mulvane, KS, Kansas Star Casino
March 10 – Lincoln, NE, Bourbon Theatre
March 12 – Boulder, CO, Boulder Theatre