Oakland-based post punk outfit Street Eaters — co-founders Megan March (vocals, drums) and John No (bass, vocals), along with Joan Toledo (guitar) — will be releasing their long-awaited and highly-anticipated fifth album, Opaque on September 5, 2025 through Dirt Cult Records. The seven-song album reportedly sees the trio attempting to stitch up the bloody wounds of their past while being a meditation on birth, death, excavated trauma, and trying to find steadfast kinfolk in a world that’s increasingly splintered, fucked up and cruel.
Much like all of us, Street Eaters have been through the wringer a bit since 2017’s The Envoy.
The band’s guitarist Joan Toledo, left a transphobic family and government in her native Florida, eventually relocating to San Francisco, where they became an editor at Maximum Rocknroll Magazine and a radical union organizer at the world famous City Lights Books.
The band’s front woman Megan March had a child. And while becoming am other was, as she puts it, “and incredible joy and opportunity to rewire emotional pathways and deep wounds,” it was also a reminder of her own childhood: March’s mother was violently homophobic and eventually threw Megan and her teenage sister — both queer — from their childhood home.
For March, childbirth was both a traumatizing and transformational experience. Ironically born on July 4, her baby immediately entered a world steeped in bureaucracy: The hospital was so understaffed that March was neglected until the last moment and was forced to endure an emerging C-section. “I was borderline dehumanized by the toxic, misogynistic nature of the American medical system and its focus on efficiency and profit before care,” she says.
“Opaque is a record that gets deep into the stark and beautiful reality of growth and transition from trauma and loss,” Street Eaters’ March explains. “What does it mean to wake up one day and realize you are living the way you have always demanded to live — yet with all those jagged piles of emotional, physical, and social/political baggage still slicing through the veil?” The album isn’t just confrontational; it’s complicated. It sees the band, much like the rest of us, groping towards identity, understanding, and a place in the world in the process of being curated. “It’s a transition into finding peace with the world — a resonant connection with community and chosen family, getting beyond a lot of the pain and hurt,” the band’s John No says. “We’re trying to suture up wounds at this point and create something that’s healthy.”
Opaque‘s first single “Tempers” is a furious, adrenaline pumping ripper featuring scuzzy, serrated power chords, thunderous guitars and March’s urgent and impassioned vocals. March says, the song is about “being in isolation and not being sure what the future is going to be like and how things will be when the storm is over.”
The accompanying video directed by Krista Wright and Theo Garvey, in a hospital waiting room, where no one ever seems to get helped with anything. The band turns the hospital room into a stage that they rip up with a furious performance of the song.
Street Eaters will be embarking on a run of live dates, which start later this month and features a September 13, 2025 stop at Hart Bar. Check out the tour dates and ticket link below.
Street Eaters tour dates – TICKETS
7/30: San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
w/ The Taxpayers, Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, 7pm
7/31: San Jose, CA @ Art Boutiki
w/ The Taxpayers, Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, 7:30pm
8/1: Los Angeles, CA @ The Smell
w/ Welt Star, BAUS, Ologist, 8pm
8/2: San Pedro, CA @ The Sardine – Recess Romp
w/ 7 Seconds, The Urinals, 6pm
8/8: Oakland, CA @ Eli’s
with Parallel, Chime School, 8pm
8/27: San Francisco, CA in Kerouac Alley
w/ Channel 3, 6pm (free!)
9/11: Silver Spring, MD @ Quarry House
w/ Signal Ghost, Vampyres From Africa
9/12: Philadelphia, PA @ God’s Automatic Body
w/ HIDE, Pinkwash
9/13: Brooklyn, NY @ Hart Bar
w/ Discreet Charms, Weegee
9/15: San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall
w/ Unwound
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