Wake Up
The Album They Don’t Want You to Hear
Released July 4, 2026 · Lazarus Grimm
Wake Up releases on July 4, 2026 — and that date is not an accident. This is an album about independence in the truest sense: independence from the systems of control that have been built around us, independence from the narratives we’ve been handed, independence from the manufactured divisions that keep us fighting each other while the people who benefit from our division count their profits. Releasing this record on Independence Day is a statement. Read it as one.
This is a new chapter for Lazarus Grimm — a departure from the interior excavation of ShadowWork and Lanterns to the Line and a turn toward the exterior. Toward the world we live in. Toward the systems that shape it. Toward the lies we’ve been sold at scale. Every track on this album is a call to action — personal, political, and spiritual all at once, because those three things have never actually been separate.
Wake Up opens with a spoken word track that functions as a manifesto: a clear-eyed, documented account of how power actually operates — campaign finance, media consolidation, algorithmic manipulation, the Epstein network, military information operations — delivered not with fury but with a flashlight and a plea. What follows is twelve tracks of some of the heaviest, most confrontational music I have ever made. This is not a conspiracy record. This is a receipts record. Every claim has a name. Every name has a source.
This album is for the person who feels something is wrong but can’t name it yet. For the person who has been told their anger is irrational when it isn’t. For the person who is tired of being divided from their neighbors by systems that profit from that division. For the person who is ready to wake up — not with torches, but with a list, witnesses, and light.
Wake Up is the heaviest record I have made — and the widest. Drawing from the groove-metal darkness of Korn, the righteous fury of Rage Against the Machine, the confessional hip-hop intensity of NF, the worship-metal conviction of Sleeping Giant, the theological ferocity of Oh Sleeper, and the genre-defying unpredictability of Falling in Reverse, this album moves between spoken word, rap, and full metal without asking permission. The production is confrontational throughout — dense, drop-tuned, and built to hit. This is music made for people who are awake and angry and refuse to be either alone.
- Wake Up The album’s opening manifesto, delivered as cinematic spoken word. A documented, clear-eyed account of how power actually works — campaign finance, media consolidation, algorithmic manipulation, elite networks, military information operations — and a direct plea to the listener to stop letting these systems divide them from their neighbors. Not a conspiracy. A map. Sets the tone for everything that follows.
- Astroturfing A direct breakdown of manufactured division: how rage is engineered, packaged, and streamed back to us with ads on top. About cutting the cord, refusing the script, and choosing truth over the tribal role they’ve assigned you.
- Yahweh Surround Me A spiritual warfare prayer set against a backdrop of systemic corruption. When the systems of power are too large to dismantle alone, I call on something larger. Yahweh as shield, as fortress, as the one constant that doesn’t bend to lobbying or corporate capture.
- Epstein Island — Let Them Rot The album’s most unflinching track. A direct address to everyone who knew, everyone who looked away, and everyone who is still protecting themselves with silence. Written for the survivors first. Justice — not vengeance — is the demand.
- Illusion of Choice About the way political and religious systems create the appearance of options while controlling the menu. Two sides of the same blade. The cage dressed as freedom. About seeing the seam and refusing to pretend it isn’t there.
- Divide and Rule The oldest playbook in history applied to the present moment. About how the fractures between us are not organic — they are engineered, funded, and maintained. About choosing not to be a pawn in someone else’s war.
- Real Talk With Jordan A direct response to Real Talk With Jordan Riley — a discernment YouTube channel that positions itself as exposing false teachers while using scripture as a weapon against the wounded. The song doesn’t attack Jordan Riley personally — it attacks the posture: the mercy-skipping, fear-harvesting, throne-building that dresses itself in biblical authority while missing everything Jesus actually did with the people religion had already condemned. If your faith needs chains to survive, it’s already dead.
- 764 Named for a network that has been used to exploit and harm children online. A direct confrontation with digital predation and the systems that enable it. Written because silence about it has never protected anyone.
- JP 3-13.2 Named for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Military Information Support Operations doctrine. About the use of psychological operations and information warfare — not just by foreign adversaries, but domestically. About knowing the tactics so they can’t work on you.
- The Two Party Gravity Well The album’s rap track and its most detailed political statement. A documented breakdown of how control happens before you ever step into a voting booth — through campaign finance, media access, debate qualification rules, ballot access laws, and gerrymandering. Not a conspiracy. An architecture.
- State Power, War Propaganda, and Religious Control About the three systems that have historically been used in concert to manufacture consent and send people to die for interests that aren’t theirs. About the moment you stop kneeling to the machine and start asking who built it and why.
- Rebuild The album’s closing track and its only answer. A prayer and a call to action in equal measure, drawing on the four Hebrew names of God — Yahweh, Ruach HaKodesh, Immanuel, Ruach Elohim — and a commitment to rebuild with hands that know how to plant and heal. Not with fury. With fierce, relentless, neighborly love.