A few Fridays ago – April 3rd to be precise – Tacoma-based street punks Noi!se released their latest full-length record. Entitled Fate Of The Union, it was a noteworthy release for multiple reasons. Not only was it the band’s third full-length record on Pirates Press and their first such release in close to a decade (its immediate predecessor, The Real Enemy, dropped back in August 2016), but it is very much a release that could easily never have happened. We caught up with the band’s longtime frontman Matt Henson for an extensive and wide-ranging peek behind the curtain at all that went into not only making Fate Of The Union a reality, but about what it takes to maintain Noi!se’s status as a vital voice and a musical force to be reckoned with in the punk and hardcore communities in a continually changing landscape.
Astute liner note readers and band promo photo viewers will no doubt notice that the Noi!se lineup circa 2026 looks markedly different than it has in years past. Perhaps most notably, a couple of years back, longtime guitarist/co-vocalist Nate Leinfelder decided to hang up his proverbial spurs and move on from the band. Given Leinfelder’s unique skills as a songwriter, vocalist, and guitar player, it represented a seismic shift in the Noi!se camp. “In 2023, Nate was like ‘hey, I’m done’” Henson explains. Leinfelder, a tattoo artist by day, not only wanted to spend more time justifiably focused on his family, but given that Noi!se’s status as a band made up of guys with day jobs meant that most band activities are relegated to nights and weekends; prime hours for a tattooer. “Band trips are done on the weekend, and that’s when he does most of his business. It’s a very different dynamic than for the rest of us who had weekday jobs.”
For his own part, Henson was mired in a bit of a creative funk during that time. “I’d stopped being able to write songs at a certain point,” says Henson. “It was around 2019. It seemed like everything I was writing was the same and I started getting really disenchanted.” And so, with Leinfelder announcing his departure, it initially seemed like that might be the end of the proverbial road for Noi!se. “I was like, “OK, well, that’s that.” It was Leinfelder himself who played a part in convincing Henson to keep the ship afloat. “We talked for a while, and he really convinced me that what the band represents is bigger. It has a positive impact, and it’s something I have put a lot of personal effort and energy into. He thought I had to keep doing it.”
If the band were to keep going, however, that invited the question of how exactly that all would work. Not only had Leinfelder and his creative forces departed, so to did guitarist Jesse O’Donnell, who relocated to Arizona. To fill the two vacant guitar player spots, Noi!se thankfully didn’t even have to look beyond their own history. Justin Miller, the band’s original guitar player, returned to Tacoma after fulfilling his obligations to the US Army and, by extension, returned to his axe-wielding duties in Noi!se. To fill the second guitar role, Noi!se turned to … their own drummer? “Kenny (Dirkes) wanted to play guitar in Noi!se before he was in the band,” says Henson, semi-joking that Dirkes “is one of those irritating people that can pick up an instrument and instantly play it better than you can.” Thus, the two-headed guitar attack would remain in place with Dirkes moving from the drum throne to the front of the stage. That left the pesky issue of finding a new drummer, however. Luckily, the band was still able to look within their own history book to find Dirkes’ replacement, albeit in a bit of an obscure footnote of said history book.
Enter: Mike Parker of fellow Tacoma punks Hilltop Rats. “Funny story,” Henson explains. “At Punk Rock Bowling in 2016, we played a pool party. Kenny’s kick drum pedal broke. Parker was there, and Parker knew all the songs, so Parker played kick drum – just kick drum – for the whole set with a little hammer-looking thing.” So when it came time to fill Dirkes’ role atop the drum throne, Parker seemed a logical fit. “He called and we talked about how much he had wanted to be in Noi!se for a long time, and how it would really be a shame if the band stopped. So that provided a solution as to how we could keep things going.” There was still one more change to bring the Noi!se lineup up to its present status. Due to some nagging wrist injuries, Henson was forced to retire the “bass player” portion of his job title in the band, meaning that he’d focus just on lead vocal duties. To fill his role in the rhythm section, the crew didn’t need to search very far either, as Parker’s fellow Hilltop Rat Aaron Williams stepped in to assume the bass playing position.
Giving up bass playing duties and reworking an entirely new band roster are far from the only major life changes that Henson has had to navigate over the last handful of years. Halloween 2023 marked the end of Henson’s two-plus decade career in the United States Army, as he retired as a Sergeant Major after 24 years, 1 month and three days of service. He’s since started a ‘civilian’ job with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the counter-WMD arm of the United States Department of Defense. Here’s the very-long-story-short version of what that means: “Specifically after the advent of the nuclear warhead, it became possible for people to weaponize radiological material,” explains Henson. “So when the Soviet Union fell, all of this radiological material was all over the world and it was unsecured. Our agency’s job is to go typically at the behest of other countries to either work with their counter-WMD forces or to straight-up take radiological sources out of their country.” Not your typical nine-to-five desk job by any stretch, it’s a job that has Henson away from his family – which collectively relocated to North Carolina – frequently, albeit not for as long at any one stretch as his military career did. “There is much more of a family buy-in dynamic where everybody has a say in when and where I go.”
To know Henson is to know that family has long been the core around which the bulk of his life has rotated. He and his wife Stephanie – whom he frequently refers to as “Super Mom” through the course of our conversation – have a fifteen-year-old son Liam and a ten-year-old daughter Faris. The former was the subject of the 2024 standalone Noi!se track “Liam,” the heart-on-your-sleeve burner of a song above that finds Henson processing the emotions that came along with not just becoming a father in word, but learning how to become a dad in deed as well. The younger Henson, for her part, presents not only as very much a quintessential ‘daddy’s girl’ but also seems destined to follow in her father’s footsteps as a performer. Ever the proud parent and family man, Henson is no stranger to sharing those exploits on social media. He does so in a way that’s authentic, rather than performative, and gives thought to what and how he shares, explaining “I want to be as positive as I can on social media, but I also don’t want to paint this picture that everything’s perfect and everything’s great.” The Henson household, like all households, is not always full of gumdrops and lollipops. “It’s absolutely not perfect all the time, but I think it’s important to understand that things can be a total piece of shit, but at the same time, you can try and find what positivity exists in that circumstance.” And if you’ve been a follower of Henson over the last handful of years, you know that in addition to family stuff (and Faris stuff specifically) and band stuff, there’s been a new topic added to the mix that has been intensely revealing of the good, the bad, and the occasionally ugly: sobriety.
For Henson, sobriety is a journey started just over 1000 days ago; July 19, 2023 if you’re keeping score at home. However, in reality, the journey started internally well before that. “I knew I needed to get sober for years,” he says. “Deep down, I knew it probably a year prior to actually quitting drinking. I knew 100 percent that I was an alcoholic. I had to stop drinking, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t figure out how to get there.” The ultimate catalyst to pulling the proverbial Band-Aid off started in a bit of an atypical fashion, although judging by what you’ve read thus far, that is probably to be expected. He’d already been giving increasing credence to the idea of quitting in the months between deciding to retire from his nearly quarter-century career in the US Army and that career actually winding down. Then came an intervention from an unlikely – and unrelated – source. “I went to the hospital with an infection,” Henson explains. “Not alcohol related, but a very, very severe infection in my arm.” As he’d already been weighing the idea of quitting drinking at that point, spending three days in the hospital seemed as good a time as any to actually pull the trigger on the idea. “I was like, ‘Well, the hard part’s done. I’ve been sober for three days now, so let’s operationalize this.”
When Henson returned home from the hospital on day four, he made the decision to capitalize on that unexpected head start without getting too far ahead of himself. Henson has long maintained an active social media presence, featuring exploits and highlights from his career, his band and, most importantly, his family. When it came to sobriety, little would change in that regard. “I made a decision that I’d give myself thirty days to make sure that I could do it,” he explains, adding that “once I realized I could, I was going to use my platform and hold myself accountable.” Henson also used friends and family and social media – yes, even TikTok. “In a time where you don’t see positivity and humanity as a whole, there are some elements on TikTok where you really do. There’s so much positive parenting advice and so much general support for people who may feel isolated and who are looking to better themselves.” That all helped Henson work through some of the travails of early recovery. “A huge, huge resource was sobriety videos, where you’re examining addiction and recovery in different venues,” he reports. “I decided when I got sober that 12-Step was not for me. Nothing against it, but it’s not something I wanted to do. I’m a big proponent of coming to things on your own accord and on your own terms. As odd as it may sound because of my former profession, but I don’t like being told what to do.”
The positive results of Henson’s recovery journey to date have been many and varied, and they appear best when closest to home. “Just being a husband and a father, you can be passionate and you can do the best you can, but you’re doing it with one hand tied behind your back if you have a problem with alcohol. And for me, I was a very functional alcoholic.” In fact, some folks who knew Henson primarily through the band and especially through that aforementioned social media presence might not have been aware that he had struggled with alcohol at all. Unlike some folks who maintain a visible online presence, Henson’s feed and his lyrics were not filled with visible and frequent debaucherous alcohol-related behavior. In hindsight, that may have helped his drinking continue longer than perhaps it should have. “I could point to the fact that ‘I’ve never gotten in trouble, and I always pay my bills, and I’m not abusive’…but that is such a low bar to set,” he points out. “When you’re an alcoholic, it’s a very easy copout where you’re constantly preparing your next argument for why you don’t need to quit. And the more you do that, the more it illustrates your need for stopping.”
As you might imagine, it hasn’t all been rainbows and butterflies since getting sober. But closing in on three years of continuous sobriety has meant that Henson has learned more than a few tricks of the trade to help stay on the right path. “I’ve conditioned my brain so that any time I think of drinking, I equate it with the worst parts of drinking…of which there are fucking tons.” It also means that he’s been able to transfer some of the same skills that afforded him a successful career in the military. “I’m now trying to weaponize all of the things that I used to be scared of, to include just sitting still and appreciating the fact that I’m here for my family.” But that doesn’t mean he ‘sits still’ for very long. After all, there’s kid stuff and life stuff and new job stuff to keep him busy. And surely there are the inevitable thoughts that maybe it’ll be okay to return to drinking; that maybe it wasn’t THAT bad? “Every once in a while, I’m like, ‘man, it must be cool to be able to drink like a normal person,” he reports, adding again semi-jokingly that “almost immediately after that, I’m like ‘but you can’t do that! It would be really cool to be able to swim across the Atlantic Ocean too, but I can’t do that either!”
Henson has been very forthcoming about his sobriety journey through all of the usual social media channels. While he maybe doesn’t walk the same Twelve Step-related path that some others walk, he’s very mindful about the idea of fellowship and helping out those who might be in the same or similar situations. “The best thing to do is look around you and see who and what you can positively impact,” reports Henson. “If you can do that, it’s going to make you feel more empowered. It’s going to make you feel better, and you’re also helping someone else.” Sometimes, that comes by way of connecting with people he comes across in his travels. Sometimes that means conversing in a direct message on Facebook or Instagram. And sometimes, that comes through music.
When it came time to write and record a new album, there was no way that Henson’s newfound sobriety wasn’t going to be reflected in the new material. Noi!se has done a good job of mixing macro and micro level subject matter into their street punk anthems, combining songs about the world we collectively live in with songs about the fear and doubt and insecurity and anxiety and depression that can come from living in such a world. But writing new material didn’t come easily; not at first, anyway. “I’d be really hard on myself,” Henson explains. “We’d have a deadline and I would put off writing lyrics because I was scared of it. And then I’d drink to lower the inhibitions.” The Fate Of The Union sessions would mark not only the first time writing and recording a full-length with the new lineup, but the first time that Henson would approach writing a new record without alcohol involved in the process.
Speaking of the process, and of the previously-mentioned writer’s block that Henson had been experiencing for a few years. Time – and sobriety – have a funny way of working things out. “About a year ago, everything turned back on and I was writing song after song after song after song,” Henson reports, adding “five of the ten songs on Fate Of The Union I wrote within six weeks of us recording.” The new lineup and the Henson family relocating to North Carolina meant another change in the way the band operated. “It started with me on acoustic whistling. I’d whistle the vocal progression and play the chord progression and send it to the guys. The guys will demo it and send it back, then I’ll take that recording on one phone, play it on my car stereo and sing the vocal progression into the other phone and send it back,” he explains. “We got that mechanism down, and that is how we did the bulk of Fate Of The Union.” (Editor’s note: And if you’re wondering, yes, the proverbial faucet is still on. Just because Fate Of The Union is completed doesn’t mean the creative streak he’s been on has wound down; in fact, Henson was trading ideas for a new song with the band moments before our call.)
“There was a lot of pressure (on this one) and I’m not one to do things half-assed, unless the laundry or dishes,” he jokes. The inclusion of Williams on bass meant that when they got to the studio, Henson could focus solely on his vocals. “Parker is great and Justin and Jenny are both such gifted guitar players,” says Henson, adding “and it’s such a gift to be able to have like a real, legit bass player in here. And if everybody is going to be a master of their craft, I need to do the same thing and really work on my vocals.” What that meant was more than just focusing on singing as well as he could, but really focusing on his health. “I would come into the studio and warm up and stay hydrated and make sure I ate. That was all new stuff to me. I never used to warm up (before a vocal session), I would just drink a bunch of beer.” Going into this record, Henson and crew approached the process from the standpoint that it had to be good, because everyone involved was an expert in their respective crafts, and so the outcome should match the input. “I feel like with all of these tools, we had to make the best record we possibly could,” he explains. “And that means everything. That means the art, that means the lyrics, that means the vocals, because if these guys are so good at their instruments, I needed to be as good with mine.” The result of all those efforts was, well, was Fate Of The Union. It’s a raw album and an intense album and a personal album in ways that Henson and crew have only scratched the surface of previously.
Case in point, the song “You Versus You,” perhaps the most personal song in Henson’s Noi!se catalog. Henson explains it as a “hard-hitting and deeply personal message about the struggle to overcome self-destructive habits.” “When Nate was in the band, he’s such a good lyricist and such a good poet that it always kind of kept me on my game,” Henson remarks. “But I think these are the best lyrics I’ve ever written,” he affirms. The band, separately and collectively, put their all into the making of Fate Of The Union. “As a consequence, this record has all the heart and soul and blood, sweat and tears that we wanted to put into it,” he reports, adding “I think we all left the studio pleasantly surprised about it. A lot of work went into this record. I probably had less to do with this record than any other Noi!se record – take that for what it is!”
The album’s ten songs – nine originals plus a reworked version of “Idle Action,” pull no punches, shining a light on the social issues and injustices that have, unfortunately, become hot-button political topics in recent years. Topics like inclusivity and standing up for marginalized people and not staying silent in the face of racist and borderline fascist dog whistles. “I really do think that there is a moral decision involved with letting it be known that there are things that you absolutely will not tolerate,” Henson states emphatically. It’s the type of leadership that Henson has always found important across all facets of his life, from the military to the homestead to the office to the band and its place in the punk rock community. “A band that refuses to address injustice or social issues is telling you exactly who they are,” he remarks. “Someone on our page or on Instagram will say ‘you guys are really making a mistake closing off half your fans,’ and I always have to say, first off, our fans know us; we’re definitely not ostracizing half our fans. Guaranteed. We’re ostracizing someone we didn’t want as a fan in the first place.”
Henson and his Noi!se comrades will play a handful of dates later this year in support of Fate Of The Union, including their first Los Angeles show at the LA Punk Invasion in September and the first Chicago show in thirteen years at the Shoot The Moon Fest at Reggie’s on May 9th. Both shows – festivals, really – feature a wide array of new and classic punk rock and hardcore bands, worlds that Noi!se themselves straddle expertly. Henson and crew remain inspired by the classic bands that we all grew up on and perhaps more inspired by the up-and-coming bands revitalizing the scene and eliminating some of the gatekeeping that is sometimes present in underground communities. “I’m a big proponent of inclusivity,” believes Henson. “We’re all getting older. We’re not going to grow out of the music, but we’re definitely going to grow out of the scene. What happens to it after we’re gone is going to be a result of what we did with it while we were here.” Henson – like yours truly – is closer to 50 than 40. But playing shows like he did recently where Noi!se was joined by his daughter Faris for the Scars We Hide-era classic “Pawn In The Game” continues to breathe life into his performing lungs. “I remember my first punk show when I was 14 or 15, and a dude grabbed me and took me around the pit,” he states. “I’ll never forget that, because I was so scared going to my first show. I didn’t know what to do, and it was just so welcoming and kind. That’s what kept me coming back.”
For more on Henson’s journey and especially more on the band’s view of the fate of our union as it stands in these incredibly polarizing and chaotic times…buy the record!
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