After 26 years, Boston’s Dropkick Murphys put down their pencils, picked up their acoustic guitars, and wrote an album of songs around some previously unseen Woody Guthrie lyrics. The power of Woody’s words meets the urgency of Dropkick Murphys' music on This Machine Still Kills Fascists (out Sept. 30).   When Dropkick Murphys formed in a barbershop basement in 1996, the goal wasn't to turn the infield at Fenway Park into a concert stage, or to turn a forgotten scrap of a Woody Guthrie lyric into an anthem ("I'm Shipping Up To Boston") that would echo from Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed Soundtrack (OST) to sports arenas and championship parades. The goal wasn't to become punk rock icons or emblems of working class Boston. The goal certainly wasn't to still be going strong a quarter-century later. The goal was simply to win a bet.   After nearly a dozen studio albums, millions of records sold, thousands of shows before packed houses around the globe, it's safe to say that Dropkick Murphys won the bet. Their celebrated discography includes four consecutive Billboard top 10 album debuts – Turn Up That Dial (Expanded Version) (2021), 11 Short Stories of Pain & Glory (2017), SIGNED and SEALED in BLOOD (2013), Going Out In Style (2011) – along with 2005’s gold-selling The Warrior's Code featuring the near double platinum classic “I’m Shipping Up To Boston.”

Jesse Ahern

Dropkick Murphys

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