It’s been 51 years since new music has been released under the name MC5. One of history’s most foundational punk rock bands, the incendiary group released just three albums before their genre-defining run ran out of gas in 1972.
That changes now. Five decades after they split up, Wayne Kramer is starting the engines back up on The Motor City Five. The lead guitarist announced Wednesday (March 9) that two new singles, an album and a national tour are on the horizon for We Are All MC5, Kramer’s reimagination of the band that started it all.
On the heels of the band’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nomination, new songs “Heavy Lifting” and “Edge of the Switchblade” are coming soon and will feature the only other surviving original member of MC5, Dennis Thompson, getting back behind the drum set. “I’m thrilled about that,” Kramer said in a statement, talking about getting back in the studio with his old bandmate and legendary rock producer Bob Ezrin. “The results are earth-shaking rock and roll.”
Coming sometime this October, the not-yet-titled album was influenced and worked on by a number of artists — one being Kramer’s friend Kesha, who joined him for a performance of MC5 track “Miss X!” in January. And though the world looks very different from the one MC5 left back in the 1970s, the themes explored then by the famously antiestablishment musicians still carry over to today’s landscape.
“We’ve just barely survived four catastrophic years of a failed presidency and a devastating pandemic,” Kramer said in a statement. “It had become so polarized and depressing that bringing in other writers was like a hope injection. Tom Morello, Jill Sobule, Tim McIlrath, Kesha and Alejandro Escovedo helped me expand the work using the most powerful weapon in existence: our creativity.”
We Are All MC5’s Heavy Lifting Tour will play eight shows through the first half of May, kicking off in MC5’s backyard: Detroit. Kramer formed the band in Lincoln Park, Michigan with Rob Tyner, Fred Smith, Pat Burrows and Bob Gaspar in the 60s, back when they were teenagers taking gigs at high school parties.
Watch Wayne Kramer introduce MC5’s new era below.