Winona Fighter announces highly anticipated album and shares new single ‘Leech’

Following a whirlwind 2025 that included the release of their critically acclaimed debut album “My Apologies to The Chef”, rising punk group Winona Fighter shows no signs of slowing down. The band has announced their highly anticipated sophomore record “Brutal & Extremely Underrated”, a swaggering collection of songs that cover everything from insecurity to friends and distrust of the government. “Brutal & Extremely Underrated” is set to be released on January 22, 2027 via Rise Records.

Shares guitarist Dan Fuson:

“On this record I think we as a band gelled more than we ever have and made space for each other while still elevating each song. The goal of serving each tune was always in mind and we hit the fricking bullseye.”

Adds front woman Coco Kinnon:

“I f***ing love this record and I love that I got to make it (once again) DIY in a garage with my two favorite people. I especially love that we get to give our fans and new listeners something real in a world of slop.”

Concludes bassist Austin Luther:

“In true Winona Fighter fashion, we put our blood, sweat, and tears into the making of this record. Our goal was to evolve as a band while still delivering the hard hitting and melodic songs we love to make. Please enjoy at full volume.”

Along with the news comes a grungy and self-aware new single titled “LEECH”. Fans can watch the music video, which was directed by Hannah Hall and embodies the song’s feelings of apprehension. “LEECH” marks the second song to be released from the upcoming record; the band shared the explosive and confrontational “BOMBS AWAY” earlier this year.

Winona Fighter tapped self-taught artist Glen Martin Taylor to create the cover art of “Brutal & Extremely Underrated”. His work maintains the same DIY ethos and authenticity found throughout the band’s discography, as he explores themes of transformation and healing through fractured pieces.

Winona Fighter spent this past summer on the road with Honey Revenge, South Arcade, Games We Play and Chase Petra on the idobi Radio Summer School Tour. They also recently performed with Shinedown, in addition to appearances at Vans Warped Tour in Long Beach and Mexico City.

They’ll be closing out 2026 at Vans Warped Tour in Orlando, in addition to opening for Taking Back Sunday at their annual holiday show in December. Next year Winona Fighter will hit the road for a two-leg US headline tour, kicking off on January 21st.

Sometimes, album titles just make sense. They capture the spirit of the band who made it, as well as the songs that make up the record. “Brutal & Extremely Underrated” is one of those titles. It’s taken from a line in “SELF AFFIRMATIONS”, the sixth song on Winona Fighter’s second full-length, in which frontwoman Chloe ‘Coco’ Kinnon – who also plays drums on all its songs – wrestles with both the way she perceives herself and the way the she feels others may perceive her. But it doubles up as a description of where she feels the Nashville trio – completed by lead guitarist Dan Fuson and bassist/producer Austin Luther – have landed in the wake of their 2025 debut album, “My Apologies To The Chef”.

That album was released to great fanfare, and established Winona Fighter as a true force to be reckoned with in the alternative/punk world. Its songs transformed Kinnon’s anxiety about both the world and her own life into a very powerful anger, the kind that inspires as much as it rages. That rage has been amped up even more on this record—which, like its predecessor, was self-produced by Luther and recorded at his home studio—but there’s a significant shift in focus. Whereas before it generally looked inwards, this time the viewpoint is more outwards, reacting to, and directly addressing, the unignorable state of the world.

That shift in focus comes partially from the sense of self-assurance that all three band members were feeling when they were writing these songs and making this record. Which also very much ties in with the album’s title.

“We went into this record with a little bit more knowledge and confidence,” shares Kinnon. “There’s more swagger, and we had bigger goals for ourselves.”

That attitude is worked into the fabric of these songs from beginning to end. Though that debut was a tough act to follow, these songs have even more bark, more bite, more visceral intensity and raw feeling than that one did. To some extent, that was reaction to the challenge of making the record after the success of the first, of not succumbing to the cliché sophomore slump.

“We definitely felt that second record cloud hanging over everything,” admits Luther, “but we also felt we were making something that was really great. It’s not a sharp pivot, but it is an evolution. We didn’t want to make the second record a copy of ourselves. We wanted to grow and evolve, so that was very nerve-wracking. Like, are we changing the right amount or too much? Are people going to get it or is it going to turn people away? I think, for all of us, it was a bit of a mind game, but we just went with our gut overall because we wanted to make a kick-ass record.”

“I still feel – in a good way – that we have a lot to prove and a lot to give,” adds Fuson. “We do have still a lot of confidence, and we’re trying to just continually do better. And I think these songs reflect that like forward momentum in both our songwriting and our playing.”

They absolutely do. From the moment it kicks off with “TV On The Radio”, “Brutal & Extremely Underrated” is full of a tangible, charged energy. At times desperate, at others vulnerable, that first song is a rush of melody and aggression, sweet yet surly, that sets the tone for what follows. Because the balance between those two things is in constant flux on these twelve tracks, shifting depending on the song and subject matter. Second track “BOMBS AWAY”, for example, is probably the most overtly political song here – a cathartic and vicious hardcore punk explosion centered around the immigration raids that have been ramping up all across the USA over the past year or so.

The album was recorded over the course of two sessions, the first of which coincided with an ice storm that rendered most of Nashville without power, and the garage in which they were recording without heat. Understandably, that prompted the band to finish it as quickly as they could.

In order to bottle the raucous energy of their live shows, as well as that created by the ice storm, this time around, the band outsourced mixing to Grammy Award-winning engineer Greg Collins (System Of A Down, U2, Eels, No Doubt). He did a great job. It’s in the almost grungy self-awareness of “LEECH”, written after Kinnon ill-advisedly read some online comments about the first record, it’s in the tense vulnerability of “Lily Cut Her Hair”, a song Kinnon wrote with PUP’s Stefan Babcock about one of her closest friends, and it’s in the raucous insecurity of “OUT! THERE!”. It’s also a huge part of the spiky, angular “Title (REDACTED)” – yes, that is a (partial) reference to the Epstein Files, but it started life as a song about AI – which closes this album with a heartfelt surge of snarling, melodic punk rock.

It all combines to create a record that fizzes with a vitality comprised of both anger and hope. More than anything, it’s an album that is 100 per cent real. That was paramount for the band to capture, especially in a day and age (and music industry) where AI is infiltrating everything. Winona Fighter, though, wanted people to unequivocally know that this was made by human beings who gave this album absolutely everything they could.

“That song is such a perfect way to end the record,” says Kinnon, “because it is – and we are – real. We speak on real things, we’re real people, everything on the record is real. Every instrument, every vocal take. There’s this one line on that song where it sounds like I’m almost out breath, but I didn’t want to edit that out. We wanted to keep the rawness and the realness in it, and I hope people can feel that.”