REVOLUTIONARIES: HOW THE SIZE QUEENS USE DIY TACTICS TO FLIP OFF THE INDIE MUSIC WORLD, A PROFILE BY CHIN-SUN LEE

“The Size Queens are double-sized or rather double-sided. I mean to say that they have double vision and double hearts. They are playful and serious, sparkling and sludgy, cruel, kind, capacious, intensely private and alone. World traveling, they perform in SROs. They haven’t seen King Tut’s tomb, but still they know what’s in it. They pick over stuff while talking to Salvation Army Gods.”—Mary Gaitskill 

“The Size Queens already did the impossible: they made three arresting records in a row. I’m referring to Magic Dollar Shoppe (2008), III (2010), and Appetite for Redaction (2011), which is probably the best three-album stretch by a recent indie band I can recall.”—Rick Moody 

If you’ve never heard of The Size Queens, it might be because their voices are too strident. In one of their first songs, “Goodbye Soldier,” released in 2006, lead vocalist Adam Klein sings these taunting lines: “Jesus brought the IED and the Twin Tower / So while you’re crying at the graveside / I’ll be pissing on a flower…” It’s one provocative verse from an entire record that deals with provocative subjects including religious fundamentalists, counterculture fugitives, military torture, and suburban xenophobia. All this in the aftermath of the WTC attacks and America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Considering the number of armed and civilian casualties already accrued by that time (a staggering 150,000+), a song like “Goodbye Soldier” could be seen as subversive and offensive. But “subversive” and “offensive” are concepts The Size Queens embrace; whether that translates in their music as gleeful parodies about paraplegic prison guards, NSA surveillance cameras, and chemical warfare, or epic manifestos concerning the homeless and disenfranchised, The Size Queens are equal parts satirical and sincere, as politically incorrect as they are politically engaged.

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Even the band’s name is a provocation, as is the title of their first record, Is It IN Yet? (Bitter Stag Records 2006). Both invite squeamish assumptions that, in our still-homophobic culture, can hardly be considered a selling point. Americans may have come around to accepting gay-ness as a condition, but aren’t quite ready to visualize its sexual aspect. Michael Mullen, co-writer and keyboardist, clarifies his interpretation of the band’s name and Is It IN Yet?: “That title for me was always shorthand for ‘Have we noticed how hard we’re being fucked [over] by these creeps, or does it need to get worse?’”

Klein and Mullen had collaborated in two previous bands, Glasstown and Roman Evening, but from the start, The Size Queens was different, looser, more lyric-driven, and with a distinctly radical personality. After years spent touring together with Glasstown, opening...