Building on the momentum of their 2023 collaboration with New Order's Bernard Sumner on “Solidarity,” Gogol Bordello return with We Mean It, Man!, a record that pushes the band deeper into a bass-heavy, loop-driven post-punk terrain without losing the unruly spirit that has always defined them.

Conceived as a full immersion rather than a stylistic detour, the album finds frontman Eugene Hutz bringing together the core strands that have shaped Gogol Bordello since the beginning. Punk, hardcore, synth punk, techno, and Gypsy music collide with purpose, framed by a production team built for controlled chaos. Veteran producer Nick Launay, whose resume stretches from Gang of Four to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, teams with Adam Greenspan to sharpen the band’s raw energy with electronic textures, gated drums, and a sense of tension that never lets up.

Hutz calls the album the band’s “post punk revenge,” and the description fits. The twelve-track set is compact, aggressive, and hook-driven, with each song engineered to hit fast and linger. The title track “We Mean It, Man!” barrels forward with pile-driving intensity before exploding into no-wave sax skronk, while “No Time For Idiots” leans into punk swagger with a chorus built to be shouted back from the pit. “Life Is Possible Again” introduces a hard-earned optimism shaped by the ongoing war in Ukraine, grounding the album’s urgency in real-world stakes.

“Hater Liquidator” is one of the album’s clearest statements of intent. Hutz describes it as a dancefloor crusher with a message for surviving the chaos of the 2020s, powered by the band’s multi-instrumental muscle and a standout organ performance from Erica Mancini. Elsewhere, “Ignition,” once code-named “Blue and Yellow Monday,” and “Mystics” channel Hutz’s long-standing love of techno into something orchestral, physical, and immediate. Meanwhile, “Solidarity,” featuring Sumner, remains a crucial bridge between eras, reframing an Angelic Upstarts anthem for the present moment.

The lineup expands on We Mean It, Man! with the addition of guitarist Leo Mintek and Mancini on synths and accordion, reinforcing the sense that Gogol Bordello is still mutating, still adding new limbs to an already wild musical animal. What emerges is not a reinvention for its own sake, but a tightening of focus. This is Gogol Bordello drawing a straight line between post-punk’s experimental playground and their own borderless, confrontational vision, delivering a record that feels immediate, political, and very much of the moment.