For the last few years, Evan Greer has been one of the most constant presences in the ongoing fight for net neutrality and internet freedom more broadly. Through her nonprofit Fight for the Future, Greer has helped organize widespread internet blackouts that protested the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills, and numerous letter writing and phone banking campaigns associated with the larger net neutrality fight.

The album isn’t gloomy or defeatist, though, and it’s well worth your listen. I had an email conversation with Greer to discuss why she decided to release another album, and how she considers her music in the context of her activism.

Greer’s activism is informed in part by her roots as a punk musician in the DIY scene. Her new album, She/her/they/them ( released Friday on Don Giovanni records ) is her first since 2009’s Never Surrender. Musically, She/her/they/them is an eclectic mix of folk punk, from the opener, “First Boy,” which more or less exemplifies the folk punk genre to the punk pop singalong “Last iPhone” that imagines a utopian postapocalyptic world without iPhones, and more complex songs like “Confluence,” which layers cello as the song slowly builds over five-and-a-half minutes. In She/her/they/them, which is named after her gender pronouns, Greer writes candidly about some of the struggles she’s faced as a trans woman (getting regularly misgendered by the media, for example), about her activism, and the general arc of things: On “Liberty Is a Statue,” for example, she notes that statues—like the Statue of Liberty—are “things we build to remind of us things that have died.”

Greer’s activism is a mix of old-school phone banking and letter writing mixed with attention-grabbing stunts: The group bought a series of billboards naming and shaming lawmakers who have either declined to fight for net neutrality or who are actively fighting against it, and website blackouts, slowdowns , and awareness-raising campaigns have been among the most successful tools net neutrality activists have deployed so far. Greer has also been instrumental legislatively—Fight for the Future has been heavily involved in a Congressional push to restore net neutrality, first through an obscure legislative process known as the Congressional Review Act that would have repealed the FCC’s move to end net neutrality and more recently through legislation that would protect net neutrality.

In recent years, the balance has tilted more toward activism, as I've been working full time helping run Fight for the Future. But to me it's all kind of the same. Whether I'm writing a song or creating a video or a campaign page, I'm using creativity, words, and art to try to reach people at an emotional level and inspire them to believe that it's worth fighting for the things they care about.

Even when I was touring full time and playing a few hundred shows a year, I was always involved in various activist projects and campaigns, and often I'd mix up my shows with workshops and trainings for unions, grassroots organizations, student groups, etc.

MOTHERBOARD: It's been a really long time since you've released new music. You obviously started as a musician but I've always known you as an activist. Why was now the time to get back into music? Do you feel like you ever put it aside or have you been working on these songs for a long time? Evan Greer: For me, music and activism have always been inextricably linked. The first song I ever wrote was in high school and it was an anti-war song about the invasion of Afghanistan. I basically felt like I couldn't go around singing about it if I wasn't going to do something about it, so I got involved and helped lead a student walkout. That was my first foray into activism, and I've been weaving together music, culture, and organizing ever since.

For me, being part of the fight is not really a choice. I get super bummed out when I'm not in the midst of an active campaign, fighting for something that matters to me. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning. But I also get depressed when I'm not making art and playing music. I'm lucky enough to have organized my life in such a way that I can do both, and releasing this album is sort of my reward for that :-)

In some ways, touring less and organizing more has actually allowed me to focus on creating art in a more sustainable and focused way than when I was on the road all the time living off of donations and burning CD-Rs off my laptop to sell at shows. It gave me the space to actually go into the studio and figure out how to share these songs with other people and make them sound the way they sounded in my head when I wrote them.

There's obviously a long connection between punk and the DIY scene and activism. But often punk activism is more along the lines of local organizing, and smash-the-state type stuff. Fight for the Future does some of this, but it also helps write legislation. You've also been involved with online protests, working on the Congressional Review Act, things like this. Is the Congressional Review Act punk? How do you approach your activism, knowing you have this punk/DIY scene background and knowing the types of activism that have traditionally grown out of that scene?

Haha what's not punk about obscure legislative mechanisms that can be used to overturn rulemaking decisions enacted by Federal agencies? ;-)

In seriousness, though, I draw a lot from my experiences in the DIY scene and more grassroots local organizing that I grew up involved in. Doing that type of activism taught me how to be scrappy and use whatever resources were available to accomplish the goal, whether it was providing some meals through Food Not Bombs or raising funds for political prisoners.

My core politics haven't changed that much from my youth of bingeing on Crass, Bikini Kill, and Dead Prez. I still fundamentally believe that our political system is broken at its roots, and needs to be dismantled and built anew. I still believe in fighting for things that everyone says are impossible to achieve. I've just gotten a lot better at it :-) By being more strategic and harnessing the power of the Internet to reach enormous numbers of people, we're attempting to turn the impossible into the inevitable. There has always been a debate about whether to work inside or outside the system. I think both are valid and needed, even if just as a form of harm reduction. But what we're trying to do is something else entirely: we're trying to hack the system in order to preserve the Internet as a transformative technology that has the potential to utterly change the rules in ways that give more people a voice than ever before.

Fight for the Future works on a wide range of issues at the intersection of technology and human rights, but at our core we're about fighting arbitrary authority and unchecked power, and defending people's basic ability to be themselves and speak their truth. I think that's pretty punk rock.