In May 2023, TX2 self-released a protest song called “Randy McNally (No Love Like Christian Hate),” naming a Tennessee official in the title over the state’s anti-drag and anti-LGBTQ legislation. It was put out through his own TX2 Music LLC, two months before he signed to Hopeless Records, and it remains the clearest statement of how Timothy Evan Thomas treats a song title: not as branding, but as a search query he wants you to run.
He has explained the tactic in exactly those terms. “I once named a song after a governor in the U.S., Randy McNally, so that everyone could look up his name,” he told Kerrang! in 2026. “I don’t give a fuck what happens to me. I stand up for what I believe in.”
Why put the name in the title?
Because a name in a title is permanent in a way a tweet is not. Streaming catalogs do not scroll away. Anyone who finds the track, on a playlist, in a TikTok audio, in a discography, is one tap from the parenthetical and one search from the record of what the named official supported. The song turns the artist’s own discography into a small, unremovable piece of accountability infrastructure.
It also spends real capital. Naming a sitting politician invites exactly the backlash TX2 already attracts as emo’s most argued-about act, and Thomas released it anyway, as an unsigned artist with no label buffer between him and the response. Critics have placed his songwriting in the punk-as-social-commentary lineage of Black Flag and The Clash, and this is the release that earns the comparison most literally.
A tweet gets deleted. A song title gets indexed.
Where does the anger come from?
From the inside. Thomas was raised in what he describes as a religious, conservative household in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he internalized shame about his own sexuality: “I grew up in a religious conservative household... I used to think there was a problem with being gay because... it was internalized. I’m bisexual, pansexual... I was closeted for years... I just want people to know there’s nothing wrong with loving whoever it is,” he told idobi’s Warped Radio. The song’s parenthetical, “No Love Like Christian Hate,” is aimed at the specific hypocrisy he grew up under: cruelty administered in the language of love.
That biography is why the political material never reads as a costume. The same year as “Randy McNally,” his Ghost of LA EP dramatized a closeted man’s collapse under those same pressures, and by 2026 the thread ran straight through the debut album: “HOSTAGE (they will not erase us)” has reportedly become a queer anthem in support of the trans community, and on “The Resistance” he calls out “the ruling class” by grievance if not by name.
Does protest music like this actually do anything?
TX2’s answer is to make the show itself the proof. He plays at protests and speaks about LGBTQ rights from the stage, keeps ticket prices low, and stays after shows, sometimes for hours, to meet fans. Music Junkie Press summarized the sum of that work as something that has made him “both a target and a lifeline, depending on who’s watching.” The lifeline half is not rhetorical: in Kerrang!, Thomas recounted meeting a Denver fan who survived a shooting at a queer club and said support groups were playing TX2’s music at their meetings.
If I die standing up for what I believe in, at least I die for something instead of nothing... It doesn’t matter how I end, what matters is what I stood up for.Evan Thomas, Kerrang!
The title as a career thesis
Three years on, “Randy McNally” looks less like an outlier and more like the mission statement the rest of the catalog grew around. The artist who named a politician in 2023 now has a debut album structured as a resistance story, a 17,000-member mental-health Discord, and arena support runs with Black Veil Brides on the books. The stakes got bigger. The tactic, saying the name out loud and daring the consequences, has not changed at all.