Aside from essentially defining the California half-pipe punk blueprint, Bad Religion has defied the usual trend-shifts or values-ditched ubiquities of the usual punk band storyline and morphed along with challenging album after challenging album amid astoundingly consistent touring, retaining their core audience while roping in subsequent generations of anxiously energetic kids. The band has long settled into the current lineup who have arguably enacted to most muscular Bad Religion to ever grace a stage: Greg Graffin (vocals) and Jay Bentley (bass) join Brian Baker (guitarist since ’94), guitarist Mike Dimkich, and drummer Jamie Miller. Bad Religion is in an almost singular position in the history of punk. Having formed right on the heels of the original explosion, they led the west coast arm of hardcore’s birth, adding their melodic riffs, zooming harmonies, and viciously verbose lyrical punch to the basic bash of hardcore. Then the band continued to expand their template through the ‘80s and into the indebted “neo-punk” sound of the early ‘90s, and weathered the questionable dichotomies of the “alternative rock” era by doing what they’ve always done – releasing explosive album after album to consistent acclaim from fans and critics. And if you’re positive there is no way they could keep doing the same thing all these years, you’d be right. They haven’t. They’ve continued to throw songwriting and production wrenches into the works so’s not to bore themselves or their never-diminishing following. They have released 17 studio albums to their ever-widening audience. The band’s rep as socially aware thought-provokers can obscure the fact they’ve remained one of the most viscerally powerful live bands on the planet, remembering it’s the beats and riffs that get your ass off the couch in the first place. Of course, being stuck to the couch was sometimes inescapable during our last terrible years of COVID fear. So once again leaning into their smarts, Bad Religion concocted an online run of eight, chronologically curated, streaming live show docuseries, recorded at the Roxy in Hollywood as COVID reared its fangs. Two seasons of career-highlighting, fan-thanking ballyhoo, featuring jaw-dropping reminders of the band’s development in the face of often simplistic skate punk pigeonholing. When he’s not stomping on some festival stage in front of thousands somewhere, singer Greg Graffin is a professor and author who has released numerous books on history and personal survival. He even garnered the prestigious Rushdie Award for Cultural Humanism from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy in 2008. In 2022 Greg released his memoir of growing up in the Punk scene, Punk Paradox. And in 2021, Bad Religion released its own long-awaited autobiography, Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion, credited to, of course, the whole band. While propped up on the band’s egalitarian legend, its focus is the long and moshing road of a band who probably would’ve laughed if you’d told their 20-something selves they’d be celebrating their 43rd anniversary. Laughed, then strapped on their guitars and jumped out on stage again. Being Bad Religion is what they do best; they see no reason to take their foot off the pedal any time soon.

Pennywise have made a name for themselves over the past 28 years as a politically minded, melodic hardcore band that has sold millions of albums and become one of the most successful independent acts of all time. Formed in 1988, the band played backyard parties in their hometown of Hermosa Beach, California, without having any aspirations other than playing as many songs as they could before the police showed up. Hermosa Beach and the surrounding neighborhoods are a prominent place in popular culture, with groups like Black Flag, The Circle Jerks and Descendants merging a fast rebellious sound with the surrounding aggressive surf and skate culture. Inspired by their predecessors, Pennywise were at the forefront of a second wave of American punk rock that would catapult the movement from a tight-knit subculture into a worldwide movement.
Through constant touring and rousing live shows, the band built a massive and dedicated following with revered classics like the incendiary “F*ck Authority,” their powerful anthem of discontent “Alien” and the stirring ode to fallen friends “Bro Hymn,” - an autobiographical song which pays tribute to the band’s founding bass player Jason Thirsk after his tragic and untimely death in 1996. Pennywise have released an impressive collection of eleven albums in the span of their 28 years as a band, including: Pennywise (1991), Unknown Road (1993), Full Circle (1997), Straight Ahead (1999), Land of the Free? (2001), From the Ashes (2003), The Fuse (2005), Reason to Believe (2008), All or Nothing (2012), and most recently Yesterdays (2014).
Their 1995 classic album About Time brought Pennywise to mainstream acknowledgement with tracks “Same Old Story,” “Perfect People,” and “Every Single Day” hitting international airwaves. For their fall 2016 tour, Pennywise will celebrate About Time by performing the album in it’s entirety along with other classic Pennywise favorites.
For Pennywise media inquiries, contact Christine Morales at Epitaph ([email protected]).

Formed in 1986 by acerbic front man Ben Weasel, Screeching Weasel immediately set out to provoke. In their early days the band was known as much for Weasel’s on-stage diatribes and battles with audience members as their music, but with the release of 1991’s My Brain Hurts they helped to usher in the pop-punk explosion, and have remained at the forefront of the genre ever since. In a career punctuated by internal friction and break-ups, to say nothing of their run-ins with promoters, label owners, other musicians and the press, Screeching Weasel has inspired countless bands with their infectious, hook-laden songs; Blink-182 and the All-American Rejects cite Screeching Weasel as an influence and Green Day’s Mike Dirnt (who played on the band’s 1994 How To Make Enemies And Irritate People) sports a Weasel head tattoo on his arm.

Ben Weasel, the only remaining original member and the only constant amidst dozens of lineup changes, sums up the band’s notoriety by noting “You can’t worry about making friends or alienating people. You’ve got to be your own man no matter who it upsets. That’s the only way to make music of any lasting value.” More than a quarter of a century on, the band continues to court controversy while seemingly effortlessly cranking out new pop-punk gems. “My goal,” says Weasel, “was always to put the crowd in a position where they didn’t know whether to boo us or start dancing.” Screeching Weasel continues to win over fans both old and new with each new release; none of their 11 studio albums have ever been out of print and their latest release, the 7-song EP Carnival Of Schadenfreude, finds the band as cantankerous and tuneful as ever. The newest lineup of Screeching Weasel is on the road and working on new songs, and will be for years to come if Weasel has his way. “Screeching Weasel is never breaking up again,” he says. “The band dies when I do.” 

Victory Lap

Sept. 29th 2017   Epitaph

The first thing to know, if you want to know about Propagandhi, is that they came here to rock. Right from the snarling opening riff of their seventh album, Victory Lap, that much is clear. For everything else that swirls around the band now, and for the last 31 years — the politics, the people and, lately, a gnawing sense of despair — the sheer volume of it all hasn’t changed.

 So even though Victory Lap was written while the world spun into darkness — we’ll get to that in a moment — this record is still made to put feet in the pit and fists in the air. Or, as frontman Chris Hannah sings on “Tartuffle,” Victory Lap’s penultimate track: “We came here to rock. Single moms to the front. Deadbeat dads to the rear. That’s how we do it here.” In that moment, Victory Lap finds Propagandhi close to how they began: a ferocious band from a wind-battered Canadian prairie, thrashing out jams in a city erected on stolen Indigenous land.

 Of course, much is different about them, too. It’s been five years since the band unleashed their sweeping sixth record, Failed States. In sonic ways, Victory Lap is a natural successor to that record; for one, it was recorded at the same cozy Private Ear studio in Winnipeg, a comfortable jaunt from their homes. But many things have happened since Failed States was made. Some people close to the band were born; some people close to the band died. Not too long after the release of the last record, bassist Todd Kowalski realized that, despite years of pushing his voice into spine-rattling registers, he’s actually a natural baritone. (He takes voice lessons now, to undo some of the damage he’d inflicted from singing too high.)

 Then there was the big change, which explains why Victory Lap came out five years after its predecessor, instead of Propagandhi’s typical four. In the fall of 2015, the band added a new member, Sulynn Hago, a seasoned guitar-slinger from Tampa, Florida. Her arrival came on the heels of a departure: after nine years with Propagandhi, David “The Beaver” Guillas wisely elected to get a real job, teaching the next generation instead of cramming their brains with jacked-up guitars. (That said, he’s still all over Victory Lap, contributing licks to four songs.)

 In the wake of his departure, Propagandhi put out a call for audition tapes; they got over 400, and Hannah and Kowalski watched every one. Of those, about 20 had the chops they were looking for. Of those 20, one stood out above the rest. Hago had the experience in the scene, she’d slugged it out on the road, and — this is also important — her voice was as fearless as her fretboard fingers. “She’s the only person who wrote to us, and identified as a raging vegan Hispanic lesbian,” Hannah says. “I was immediately like, ‘whoa, let’s check this out.’”

 Meanwhile, a refugee crisis was peaking, unarmed Black men, women and children were being murdered by police, and the the carbon in the atmosphere kept right on heating. While Propagandhi was writing Victory Lap, a loud man called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and bragged about sexually assaulting women. Half a nation shrugged, and elected him president. White supremacists started getting glossy features in magazines, and airtime on cable news.

 This is a band that has always been fiercely political, that never backed down from calls for justice. Yet the events of 2016 still left them reeling, facing a landscape in which fascism is,

 among a certain crowd, suddenly trendy. “It hit me in a way I can’t really describe,” Samolesky says. “I almost feel like I’m trying to reinvent purpose out of this change, and the resurgence of the far right. How is this going to affect us, with what we do — and in the grander scale, where is this heading?”

 All of those travails find their way onto Victory Lap, in ways both subtle and obvious. But there are deeper questions on this record too: oh, you know, stuff like the meaning of this whole shebang we call life. In 2016, Kowalski’s father died; Samolesky lost his father only months later. In the wake of those losses, Kowalski wrote two songs for the record, “Nigredo” and “When All Your Fears Collide.” Both, he says, were written in “total darkness,” and both wrestle with grief and existential depression. “The whole time, the whole year of making songs in my head is complete despair,” Kowalski says. “It’s partly why I only have two songs on the record. I felt like I had to do that one (Nigredo) right.”

 On the opposite end of the journey, there was creation. Between touring on Failed States and starting work on Victory Lap, Hannah, now 47, welcomed his second child. It didn’t make playing in a rock’n’roll band any easier. “Seven years ago I used to get up, and go straight to the guitar,” Hannah says. “Now it’s straight to making somebody's lunch, or making somebody’s breakfast. At the end of the day there was that golden hour... of feeling creative. Well, that’s gone. Now you’re getting attacked by two kids.”

 Yet it is that experience of fatherhood that informs what could be Victory Lap’s most poignant track, the closer “Adventures in Zoochosis.” The instrumental riffs are more upbeat than the lyrics, but in their razor-sharp musings about coming to terms with life in modern society’s comfortable cages, Hannah expresses the hope of all parents: that there will be a better life, a brighter life for their children.

 Perhaps that thought is an antidote of sorts, to the grim haze that hangs over the world these days. Perhaps we all need someone we love fiercely enough, to keep trying. “Something I struggle with now is that I think it’s all over,” Hannah says. “That anything short of the destruction of civilization is just rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s the elephant in the room. You cannot have what we have, and expect it to go on into the future.”

 So what do you do, when you’re an unapologetically political band in a time when political speech seems more fractured than it has been in years? When the darkness looms and the rapacious maws of power seem to devour more by the day? You can’t stop the violence; you can’t save the world. But neither can you stand to sit back, and just watch it all burn. So here’s what you do: you strap up a guitar and get ready to rock. Single moms to the front; deadbeat dads to the rear. This is still Propagandhi we’re talking about, and that’s how we do it here.

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