It takes a lot of nerve to use a word like “party” in one’s band name anymore. Fortunately for Fort Worth-bred garage rockers, War Party, audacity is in no short supply.

Since 2011, the retro-minded, punk-leaning lot have used a mix of skuzzy guitars, horns and a dirty organ to wage a two-front war on the music world: on the road, where they’ve spent relentlessly hitting both coasts with like-minded acts like Dallas’ Sealion, and at home, where War Party has been named “Best Punk Band” by the Fort Worth Weekly, and where members of the band have helped foster Fort Worth’s emerging DIY scene through the Lo-Life Recordings label they founded and the Dreamy Life Records brick-and-mortar shop they help run.

A solid mix of garage rock, surf-pop, post punk and Smith’s manic musings on life. “To Love and Fear It [War Party's latest full length record] is largely about the mixed feelings that exist in the fringes of impulse and self-identity,” Smith explains. "[To Love and Fear It] is about paranoia and compulsion, an internal observation of a sort of outside sub-dimension; a world that exists solely within a singular mind but yet is conjured from an amalgamation of outside influences.”

War Party, after all, is on a rampage, spreading its own brand of pure, unadulterated rock-n-roll to the masses. Members Cameron Smith, Peter Marsh, Tyler Moore, Ricky Williford, and Chris Waldon draw influences from groups like Fugazi, Modern Lovers, Wire, Guided by Voices, Gang of Four and The Replacements all the way to songwriters such as Dion & The Belmonts, Simon Finn and Leonard Cohen.
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"Those placid wells
Where children fell
To drown in neutral spirits
Or ring a bell or cast to hell
The keeping of appearance
A meandering fall which most of all
Makes men out of coherence
And the least of these
will come in threes;
To lust then to love and fear it."
-C. Smith