There is a specific quality to the astonishment of someone whose entire professional training has prepared them for a threat that then, in one surreal television moment, appears to dissolve. Jason McKee spent ten years in the Royal Australian Navy, and during those years on seagoing vessels, the message delivered over the captain’s speaker with trained regularity was that North Korea represented an unstoppable force requiring constant preparation and vigilance. This was not abstract geopolitical information but professional reality, the kind of institutional certainty that shapes how you see the world and what you expect from it. And then, during Melbourne’s extraordinary lockdown, in the rare moment he turned the television on to check if the city’s status had changed, Jason saw Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un walking together in peace and solidarity. He thought he was seeing things. He nearly fell over when he confirmed it was real.
War Killer, released May 15, 2026 as a single from the Reetoxa album Soliloquy, was born from that television moment, and its origin is one of the more genuinely unusual stories in contemporary punk songwriting precisely because it emerges not from ideology or political alignment but from raw bewilderment, the specific shock of a military-trained observer watching something happen that his entire professional preparation had insisted could not happen. Jason McKee is honest about knowing nothing about politics and not particularly understanding it, which is not a disclaimer but the most important thing to understand about why War Killer sounds the way it does, the song being a human response to a human moment rather than a political position dressed in punk clothing.
The punk tradition that War Killer draws from has always contained within it a strain of music that is not ideologically sophisticated but emotionally sincere, the Sham 69 comparison that McKee himself reaches for being exactly this kind of music. If the Kids Are United is not a complex political analysis but a simple and powerful statement about what becomes possible when division is set aside, and War Killer operates in this same tradition, the punk energy in service of a feeling rather than an argument. Can’t we celebrate a great occasion no matter who we support? McKee asked this question of his Facebook friend who was deep in political battles, perhaps naively he admits, and the naivety is the song’s moral core rather than its weakness.
The recording carries its own mythology within the Reetoxa story. War Killer nearly did not make Soliloquy, which is a 26-track album selected from a catalog of 1800 songs, those numbers alone being evidence of the extraordinary creative period that emerged from Melbourne’s lockdown and ended with McKee in hospital for six weeks. The song’s eventual inclusion was secured by the band’s first take following a beer and tequila break at The Avenue Studio in Cheltenham, the loosened state of the session apparently unlocking something in the performance that the more careful approach might not have produced. McKee and producer Simon Moro looked at each other when the take finished with the shared recognition that they had something special, and the immediate follow-up recognition that they might both get cancelled for it. Neither outcome has materialized in the straightforward way they feared, and the song has instead become an early fan favourite without any formal promotion, which is the kind of organic response that cannot be manufactured.
The Cheltenham studio location carries its own significance for McKee, who grew up in the lower socioeconomic suburb of Frankston North Pines and found something romantically satisfying in returning to the suburbs to record. This working-class spatial identity runs through the Reetoxa project in ways that connect it to the punk tradition’s roots in the British and Australian suburban experience of the late seventies and early eighties, the music emerging from the specific texture of lives lived outside the glamorous centers of cultural production. War Killer is a suburban punk song about global geopolitics observed on a television during a lockdown by a former sailor who cannot understand how the most heavily armored diplomatic problem of the era got resolved by a phone call. The comedy and the genuine emotion coexist in that framing without either undermining the other.
The tension McKee describes between his punk heroes, most of whom align politically in ways that make a song finding any positive dimension in a Trump foreign policy moment complicated, and his commitment to letting art speak the truth of what he actually witnessed and felt, is the creative integrity that makes War Killer honest rather than calculated. He is not making a case for Trump. He is making a case for peace, for the principle that if something genuinely good happens it should be celebrated regardless of who was responsible, a position that sounds obvious and in the current political climate is apparently radical enough to feel risky. The punk delivery is the appropriate vehicle because punk has always been most powerful when it is saying the uncomfortable thing rather than the fashionable one.
With a UK and European autumn tour in early talks, Reetoxa is preparing to take this material beyond the Australian context that produced it, and War Killer will be interesting to hear in rooms where the Trump phenomenon lands very differently than it does in Melbourne. The song might be divisive. It might get people arguing. But Jason McKee, navy veteran and accidental punk political songwriter, believes the world needs unity more than it needs more heat, and if a punk rock song about a surreal pandemic television moment can get a few people thinking about that, it will have done its job.
