Punk is a perennial force. It comes back with thorns and petals. Like an ambulance siren in an emergency, or the rainstorm that pummels away a heatwave, music needs it when the world becomes too much to bear, when everything—our politics, our lives—call to be sharpened. As a term, punk has always contained dizzying multitudes, which is why it is great and why it often fails.

The most powerful punk in 2015 acts distinctly as opposition art. It is self-activating music that appears at arm's length. It lets sound be a mirror where you can find yourself and hear that culture is in your own hands. It is a reflection of a shared agency; messy, never right, always flawed. It is an aesthetic of embodied philosophy, lightning-bolt reflections of searing reality, fleeting sparks of beauty in the dark.

Punk still offers this transcendence, and within the recordings and performances of two remarkably contemporary young groups, it seems to be getting better at it. G.L.O.S.S. and Downtown Boys perform two-minute acts of pure insurrectionism: their irreverence rejects canons and gives voice to the unheard. Their lyrics are such purposeful and poignant sketches of modern ire and malaise from the margins—for queer and trans people, for people of color, for women and the working class—that you could picture some of these words reborn in gospel or folk. They burn the no-future scripture of punk history to the ground as they scream its ashes away.

Now, in punk, there is only the future.