Rise Against - CD collection

[02-08-2026]

Oh Rise Against, what am I gonna do with you? The way people talk about Rise Against now often feels like the way people talk about The Simpsons. Once lauded as the band to look out for, the ones that were bringing political punk, righteous anger, and genuine passion to the masses, are now often regarded as corporate, limp stadium rock sellouts. So what's the deal? Well, much like with The Simpsons, it's complicated.

The band from Chicago were a very early one for me. Not quite the very first wave of bands I latched onto, like Die Ärzte, Linkin Park or Green Day, but pretty much right after. Like so many, my first contact with them had been the game Need for Speed Underground 2, that features Give It All, a powerful, catchy, punk rock pump up anthem that now feels so ubiquitous to me that listening to it almost seems redundant. It's like We Will Rock You or Eye of the Tiger.

The albums

The band's lineup has been very stable from the beginning, with Tim McIlrath on vocals and rhythm guitar, Joe Principe on bass and Brandon Barnes on drums. Just finding a stable lead guitarist took a good while, but they got there, eventually. Everyone was some variation of vegetarian, vegan, or straight edge, and McIlrath in particular was very captivating, not just due to his powerfully impassioned, raspy vocals and likable demeanor, but also his striking heterochromatic eyes that gave him a special sort of mystique. Like a husky.

Right from the first album, The Unraveling, released in 2001 in Fat Wreck Chords, you could tell that this band had something special in how they married unrelentingly sharp hardcore punk aggression with fantastic musicianship, catchy melodies, and anthemic, soaring choruses. The first album in particular has something special to me in the way it has possibly the greatest variation in tempo in their whole discography, having both the fastest songs of their career, but also some real slow, almost stadium-rocky tracks, that due to the band's very grassroots background and its rough production felt very genuine and only served to enhance the impact and personality of the whole album.

The band managed to find their niche, make a name for themself and perfect their craft of aggressive, impassioned songs with captivating, sing-along choruses, and an impactful socio-political message. The next three albums I think are the blueprint for the perfect political melodic hardcore albums with massive crossover appeal simply because the songwriting is just that good. Revolutions Per Minute laser focused on perfecting the melodic hardcore of the predecessor. Afterwards, they signed to major label Geffen Records and released Siren Song of the Counter Culture and The Sufferer & the Witness. The amount of classics they banged out during this era is seriously mind boggling, and their compositions also got more and more inventive, especially on tracks like Prayer of the Refugee and The Good Left Undone, which make use of striking tempo changes, or even atmospheric spoken word pieces like The Approaching Curve. The politics of the band for the first time became unignorable, particularly with the graphic animals rights music video of Ready to Fall. They also weren't afraid to show their gentle side, like the campfire acoustic ballad Swing Life Away, which became moderately successful on its own and tricked some people into buying a hardcore punk album, at least judging from an Amazon review or two I remember reading back in the day. My personal favourite from the band is the closing track on Siren Song, the very personal Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, a song that leans into the emo appeal of the band with powerful lyrics on the fear of trying to break out of your shell. The band having signed to a major label was reason enough for many punks at the time to write the band off as sellouts, but it didn't seem like they were slowing down or self-censoring at all, if anything, they became bolder than ever. Just the one thing, a dark omen for the future: The Sufferer & the Witness's production noticeably made a huge jump away from the rough but clear hardcore sound of the band's early albums and was smoothed out considerably. I don't think this is a problem yet, the album still feels plenty powerful and urgent, but in hindsight, I take this as a first sign of things to come. Still, if there's anything I want anyone to take away from this post, the mid 2000s Rise Against albums are really just this fucking good. Seriously.

And the good albums don't stop yet. At least in my opinion. If Rise Against hadn't yet fully made their name known to the masses, the next album Appeal to Reason would turn them from a curious crossover punk band into serious contenders for a long-lived mainstream career. Appeal to Reason is also the first album with lead guitarist Zach Blair, who would finally complete a stable lineup for the band. Appeal to Reason is, despite its increased mainstream appeal, a fantastic album that shows a band not willing to rest on their success and willing to branch out. It had three massive singles, the soaring barn-burner Savior, a song that has I take for granted almost as much as Give It All, the very dynamic and powerful stadium rock anthem Audience of One, and the anti-war acoustic ballad Hero of War that really leans into McIlrath's abilities as a storyteller. The album was also lead by the very metal-tinged single Re-Education (Through Labor), that came with a music video in which they do no less than blow up the city of Chicago. This albums has everything, anthems, ballads, ragers, and every song is fantastic. This album is a great example of a band "going mainstream" and creating some of their best work with it. Another deep cut favourite I wanna point out here is Entertainment, a song with a plotting energy that is broken up by a 3/4 waltz in the middle and eventually builds back up and explodes back into a fiery scream for its grand finale. I mean it, this album has everything. Even if you're not into punk, this is just a damn exciting rock album.

The time after Appeal to Reason is where I came into the picture, and the first new release that I was there for and was able to be excited for in real time was Endgame. I think Endgame is great, and I have a lot of fond memories related to this album and a lot of the tracks bring song very interesting elements to the table. The odd rhythm of Broken Mirrors or the metal breakdown in Midnight Hands, for example. Satellite has managed to join the ranks of the upper echelon of Rise Against songs I truly consider all-time-classics. Make It Stop (September's Children) is the first time the band explicitly spoke out in support of queer lives, which genuinely felt very impactful at the time, and let's not forget the very striking lead-single Help Is on the Way. It's a good album. Still, with some distance, there's something missing here, the share of songs I actively come back to today is diminishingly small. Before we make it to the next album though, they released the compilation Long Forgotten Songs, which is a very comprehensive collection of covers, outtakes, 7-inches, EPs and soundtrack contributions. This album features samples of every style the band has done up to this point and then some, but everything at exceedingly high quality, making for a very exciting and enjoyable listening experience, and it even launched a mainstream radio single with the Face to Face cover Blind. This compilation also came just at the right time for me, as I distinctly remember that shortly before its release, motivated by my passion in graphic design and working out album sequencing, I had made my own rarities compilation, which I had called Sights Unseen. Honestly, I think my name was better, cause the song Sight Unseen is actually included on the compilation, unlike Long Forgotten Sons, which is a track from Appeal to Reason.

Unfortunately, this was also where the genuine excitement for Rise Against would also slowly begin to fizzle out for me. When the next album, The Black Market, came out, my excitement was huge, but sadly, it quickly disappeared the moment the moneymoon phase of a new Rise Against wore out. At the time I was knee deep in my skate punk obsession, so slow songs weren't gonna cut it, and boy, these songs were mostly pretty slow. Looking back at their discography today, I no longer think slow songs are inherently a problem, as I praise The Unraveling specifically for its slow songs. But given the low average speed, and the clean production that modern Rise Against had that took a lot of the edge and urgency off the music, it becomes much more of an issue. The follow-up album Wolves initially seemed to me like an improvement, but in hindsight, that album left zero impression on me. Today, I definitely prefer The Black Market over Wolves, because despite the lower speed, has some really uniquely written songs that I like to revisit from time to time, such Zero Visibility, while Wolves might as well could have disappeared straight into the void. I also saw the band live during their Black Market era, so I have a bit more of a personal connection to this album. This phase of their career is concluded with The Ghost Note Symphonies, an album of gentle, mostly acoustic, reimaginings of songs from all over their discography. It's fine, I do find alternative versions interesting, but this style doesn't really do it for me. Whatever, into the void you go.

I was feeling quite sour on Rise Against by this point, and the next album, announced through the title track Nowhere Generation, did little to make me excited. It wasn't a bad song, but it mostly felt pretty empty, like they were going through the motions. However, when the full album came out, I thought it was a real return to form. The production wasn't much different than its predecessors, but it had so many more songs with a sense of energy, power and real urgency. We weren't back to the peaks of the 2000s golden era, but this was great. I was excited to be listening to Rise Against again, and the addendum EP, creatively titled Nowhere Generation II confirmed this. Rise Against are back, baby! I can't wait to see what's coming nex- Hmm. In return, the reception to their most recent album, 2025s Ricochet, has probably been the biggest disaster I've seen from bands in my orbit in recent years. I think the most positive opinion I've seen in the wild about this album is "it's alright", or "it's not that bad". I wish I had more to say, but this album really doesn't give me much to work on. Not only are the songs slow and limp, they feel trivial and unmemorable. The production that I had my issues with for as long as I had been a fan of the band was now not only too clean, it sounds downright bad. Mushy, echo-y, compressed, crunched. There are moments where I'm wondering if my copy of the album has been ripped off of Youtube 15 years ago, but no, this is my CD. This is how they sold the album to me. This album just sounds like that, it's baffling. I don't think this is unsalvagable, there's probably a decent album in there somewhere, but this is not it. Keep digging.

So, are Rise Against like The Simpsons? Kinda, yeah. I'm always gonna be interested in what they're up to, Rise Against have had too big of an impact on me to start ignoring them, but man, what am I gonna do with you? Being a Rise Against fan in the 2020s isn't easy. If I can do a little armchair psychology, I kind of feel like Rise Against is a band that became too big for their own good. Venues too big, too much merch, sponsorships, cross-promotion, media attention. It seems like too much, it's not sustainable for a band that is supposedly subversive. This is a very vibes-based diagnosis, but it feels right. I wish them the best, but for the past 10 years, I've listened to all your music with caution, and that's how it's gonna remain.

The collection

Rise Against have very good distribution and you can pick all their albums, pretty much anywhere, for pretty cheap, and I can recommend doing so, as they all come with very nice art and booklets. My copies of Siren Song, Sufferer and Appeal I've had for pretty much as long as I can remember. All my copies of albums #2 to #5 are the European editions that come with a bonus track each: Anywhere You Want It on Revolutions, Fix Me on Siren Song, Boy's No Good on Sufferer and Historia Calamitatum on Appeal, though all of these have also been included on Long Forgotten Songs. The debut album The Unraveling I have both as the original 2001 release (Tim on CD) and the 2005 reissue (red CD, two bonus tracks that have also been included on Long Forgotten Songs). The second album Revolutions per Minute was reissued under the name RPM10 for its tenth anniversary. It comes in a digipak with 10 demos of album tracks. My copy of Endgame is I believe a pre-order exclusive limited edition in a fairly thin digisleeve. At the time, digipaks and digisleeves still had a feeling of prestige and exclusivity to them, but looking back now from the 2020s where most CD releases are just put out in the bare minimum packaging in the thinnest, flimsiest digisleeves they can get away with, I do kind of regret not having the regular jewel case edition. Though it's very cheap, so I might as well rebuy it one of these days. For what it's worth though, the digisleeve edition is nicely done, although the booklet is glued into the sleeve, which I'm not a fan of. My copy of Ricochet has two live bonus tracks. I don't know what version of the album this is or if it's anything noteworthy, I didn't buy the album on release and only picked up this copy later second hand.

Beyond the studio albums though, Rise Against are a fairly difficult band to collect extra material for, and I am very lucky I got as much as I do. First of all, there's the EP This Is Noise, released between Sufferer and Appeal. It comes in two different versions, the original 5-track North American version in the dark grey cardsleeve, and the European 7-track version that came a year later in a jewel case with a lighter cover. The tracklisting is very different on both versions, as the European version took out the tracks that were already included as bonus tracks on the EU versions of the albums and replaced them with live material. Every unique track on This Is Noise is also included on Long Forgotten Songs. This ultimately means that there aren't really any rare Rise Against tracks left that you need to hunt down, because everything has been conveniently re-released, and buying any EPs or special editions of albums only makes sense as a collectible.

As for singles, despite them already having been on a major label during a time when it was still common to put out CD singles to stores, Rise Against never did that, and every single you can see in my collection is a 1-track promotional copy, so they don't include any extra material and serve, once again, only as collectibles. I particularly like the artworks on the two lead singles from the Appeal era, though. They're a very good example of what I find so interesting about single artwork on the application of the design language of the album to other covers. Then there's also "promotional CD sampler", which I imagine was sent to radio stations to promote Siren Song, and it features Give It All and Anywhere But Here in the album versions. I don't think this is a 100% complete collection, I'm sure there's a couple more plain no-artwork promos floating around, but I am very satisfied with this.