Fifteen years ago, Against Me! released their greatest album, and few noticed or cared. While 2007's New Wave was their most critically acclaimed record at the time, a major label move that won them SPIN's album of the year and made it to #21 on the Pazz & Jop poll (at the expense of the loyalty of many anarcho punks in their audience), little noise was made about White Crosses upon release. It got them a modest alternative rock radio hit ("I Was a Teenage Anarchist"), a few fans in the critical sphere, but nowhere near the amount of press and praise that New Wave had received, only placing at #67 in Pazz & Jop.
Maybe the lack of context for the record's bittersweet energy, uncharacteristic for the band, was the reason for the critical ambivalence. Against Me! were never a band selling hope, with even a love song like "Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart" primarily terrified of the potential for an ending. On White Crosses, however, there's an undercurrent of optimism. There are moments of pure devastation, for sure — "Because of the Shame" is about the death of lead singer Laura Jane Grace's friend and former lover, with its sound modeled after Bruce Springsteen, a favorite artist of said friend. But with lyrics like "You can forget your name/And there's no need to apologize" and "What God doesn't give to you/You've got to go and get for yourself," the primary feeling on White Crosses is the embrace of autonomy, over one's identity especially.
Two years later, the reasons for this would become clearer after Grace came out as a trans woman. She hadn't explicitly decided to come out during the writing and recording of White Crosses, but she was getting there, aware that the dysphoria she'd suffered from since she was a mere five years old wasn't going away — that art, fame, love, and parenthood couldn't crush the demons. As such, White Crosses is a unique album in the trans musical canon: the rare "I need to transition or I'll be dead soon" album. It's a work that feels like letting down one's shoulders, unclenching one's jaw. It's an album of relief, even though it doesn't feel like it at first. The title track is based around an act of destructive protest, "I Was a Teenage Anarchist" around one's naive ideals crashing down, and "High Pressure Low" around still striving to maintain those ideals in a world where a brighter future seems increasingly unattainable.
Still, even the most emotionally painful song, "Ache with Me," is about camaraderie as a deterrent to despondency in the face of struggles both internal and external: "Ideals turn to resentment/Open minds close up with cynicism/I've got no judgment for you/Come on and ache with me." She may be singing to a fellow dejected utopianist, or she may be singing to the woman inside of her, throwing around the idea of finally letting the world see her — inner collectivism, maybe
White Crosses was written and recorded with the express intention of getting a hit record, like Lou Reed in 1970, tasked with recording an "album loaded with hits." While New Wave had been a critical darling, it also only made it to #57 on the Billboard 200, well below the expectations the label had for the band when they signed them. But Against Me!'s contract granted them a second album with the label, regardless of the first album's sales. So Grace went back into the studio with returning producer Butch Vig, who'd helped her hone her creativity on the previous album. The band was in the middle of a lawsuit with their former manager, so Grace was dealing with financial uncertainty as well as the dysphoria that had always plagued her no matter how hard she tried to push it down. White Crosses was her attempt at living up to her ambitions and finally solving all of her problems the way she'd always tried to — with hard work, art, success.
The album charted higher than New Wave—#34 on the Billboard 200. It wasn't enough, and Against Me! was dropped from Sire. Grace couldn't distract herself from herself anymore. She spent the next almost two years figuring out how to come out — growing her hair out, soothing the pain with substances, and writing a concept album about a trans sex worker that eventually morphed into 2014's Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the most acclaimed and highest charting album of her career. She came out publicly in 2012, at age 31, in a Rolling Stone profile as messy as most writing about transness from outsiders was at the time.
White Crosses stands as a fascinating time capsule; of revelation and discovery. On New Wave, Grace had actually come out, singing "If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman/My mother once told me she would've named me Laura," words that in 2025 would certainly lead to questions and speculation. In 2007, nobody was thinking about that, so those who noticed put tremendous effort into deciphering a lyric as plainly stated as it possibly could be. (One user on SongMeanings, back in 2008, hilariously thought the song was an attempt at empathizing with George W. Bush, and that the Laura in question was Laura Bush.)
White Crosses doesn't have anything as cut and dry as that explicit coming out. But that makes it more special to me. It's not a cry for help, but a calm and hopeful look forward, into a future that will surely carry with it pain and judgment and the contempt of strangers. No more hiding, though, and no more surrendering of the self. "What God doesn't get to you/You've got to go and get for yourself." So she went and got it. In July 2019, I went and got it too. A year later, I got the lyric that comes before that one tattooed on my shoulder: "Push back, push back, push back/With every word and every breath." Whether it be through showing the world your true self or refusing to let your open mind close off to cynicism, always be defiant. Come on and ache with me; embrace any feeling but numbness.
