Whenever Iowa City hardcore punk outfit Bootcamp sets off for the divey bars and dimmed basement venues of a tour, vocalist Juliette Enloe sets a phone lockscreen to a map of the U.S., with the state of Iowa circled in blazing red. The reason? Non-Midwest audiences never seem to know where Iowa is. Listening to the band speak to iHearIC host (and fellow musician) Justin Comer this past August, a week before the band’s newest release Time’s Up hit airwaves, one thing rings clear — Bootcamp might be just the ticket to put Iowa City on the map, at least in the tightknit world of hardcore.
Time’s Up sees Bootcamp on the precipice of something bigger, freshly signed to Denver-based DIY underground label Convulse Records, alongside an ambitious 10-date tour across Japan and Korea this past summer. The album, in its own way, feels physically imposing, given the range of subject matter it harnesses and confronts.
Raucous bite-sized manifestos on healthcare hierarchy, exhaust pollution, border patrol, housing decampments and corporate cogs ooze with equal parts venomous contempt and unbridled empathy, yearning for better, but marked with unmistakable dejectedness. Its lyrics, which are written by multiple members of the band, are meaty and dense with dressing-downs of “clowns of congress,” bosses (“I’ll jerk off with my left hand / With my right deny your PTO”), and the systems we’re trapped in (“The border is fake / Open the gates”). And yet, Time’s Up clocks in at a punchy 14 minutes.
Runtime is limited, but stunningly maximized here — fitting for an album all about how time is running out. Bootcamp’s style of frenetic D-beat-driven fem punk is a significant contributor to the urgency of each and every tackled topic. Between Oliver Weilen’s brisk drumbeats, Molly Enochson’s gravelly basslines, Sperry’s blistering guitar distortions, and Enloe’s ragged, piercing vocals, each song feels as if it’s exploded out of mouth and amps, unable to be contained anymore, desperately scrawled out before the world’s end.
The time urgency and the topics racing against it are, of course, painfully and increasingly relevant to growing political, social and environmental climates. It’s almost frightening how Bootcamp astutely identifies patterns that are already in motion — barreling towards disaster and absent an emergency brake.
Because of this, lyrics put to paper and yelled vocals put to tape on blustery winter days back in January bite back even harder. Case in point: “CEO,” an acidic ballad of health insurance failings for a man’s “wife and unborn kid,” was penned before the United Healthcare CEO met his fate. “Kiss your wife / Tuck in your kids / Sit by your pool / Crack a beer / The shot that blows your head apart / You won’t even hear.” The echoes ring against pounding drums and noisy feedback, and carry across the tracklist. Vitriolic stances grounded in the “now” culminate in heart-ripping dread of the “future” and its next generation.
The lyrics “Don’t wanna give her a world that’s on fire / Don’t want to bring her into this hell” scorch through in the final seconds of Time’s Up. Instead of blazing it out in final guttural gasps or a decided bang of a drum, those two lines repeat while fading out, as if circling a drain, or perhaps reaching the final grains of sand in an hourglass. Time’s up.
Correction: the original review of ‘Time’s Up’ stated that Sperry solely wrote the lyrics to the album and has since been updated to reflect that multiple members of Bootcamp contributed.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2025 issue.
