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.

Dropkick Murphys proudly remain Boston’s rock ‘n’ roll underdogs turned champions. Since 1996, the boys have created the kind of music that’s meant to be chanted at last call, in packed arenas, and during the fourth quarter, third period, or ninth inning of a comeback rally. Their celebrated discography includes four consecutive Billboard top 10 album debuts (2021’s Turn Up That Dial, 11 Short Stories Of Pain & Glory, Signed and Sealed in Blood, Going Out In Style), along with 2005’s gold-selling The Warrior’s Code featuring the near double platinum classic “I’m Shipping Up To Boston.” Whether you caught a legendary gig at The Rathskeller (The Rat) under Kenmore Square, found the band by taking the T to Newbury Comics to cop Do Or Die in ’98, discovered them in Martin Scorsese’s Academy Awardwinning The Departed, or saw ‘em throw down at Coachella (or one of hundreds of other festivals), you’ve become a part of their extended family. Dropkick Murphys’ music has generated half-a-billion streams, they’ve quietly moved 8 million-plus units worldwide and the band has sold out gigs on multiple continents. In 2020, the band was one of the first to embrace streaming performances, starting with their Streaming Up From Boston St. Patrick’s Day virtual performance. It was followed by last year’s landmark Streaming Outta Fenway livestream, which drew more than 5.9 million viewers and held the #3 spot on Pollstar’s “Top 2020 Livestreams” chart. Dropkick Murphys St. Patrick’s Day Stream 2021...Still Locked Down, was #1 on Pollstar’s Livestream chart for the week ending March 22, 2021, logging over 1 million views. Dropkick Murphys return September 30 with their first-ever all-acoustic album, This Machine Still Kills Fascists (Dummy Luck Music / [PIAS]), followed by their first-ever seated theater tour kicking off in late October. This Machine Still Kills Fascists breathes musical life into mostly unpublished lyrics by the legendary Woody Guthrie, curated for the band by Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie.

THE ADICTS began life as the Afterbirth & The Pinz, in their hometown of Ipswich back in late 1975. They scored many Indie Chart hits in the Eighties, and are unbelievably still together, and still making great music, with the same line-up – Keith ‘Monkey’ Warren, vocals; Mel Ellis, bass; Pete Dee Davison, guitar; and Michael ‘Kid Dee’ Davison, drums – to this day. Newer members are John Scruff Ellis (Mel’s brother) guitar.

“I think we all started for different reasons,” recalls Monkey, of their distant origins. “Pete and Kid moved to Ipswich from Sunderland were already playing on their own, using pillows for drums in the front room.

Mel had just failed the audition for Nick Kershaw’s band (too tall apparently) and I was a punk without a cause. Exactly what year that was may vary depending on who you talk to.

Some say ’75, some say ’76. I think I have a flyer from March ’76, but before that we had played our first show in a scout hut in Aldburgh, Suffolk – not exactly top of the list for all time top punk venues! We strung a rope across the room to keep the ‘crowd’ back and had a motor bike for a lighting rig. As far as our musical education goes, I think Pete took music at school, and Kid just liked to hit things. I don’t know where Mel got his ‘talent’ from but it seems to run in the family. I still can’t play anything.”

They soon changed their name to THE ADICTS and became known for their distinctive Clockwork Orange ‘Droog’ image, which, along with their urgent, uptempo music and light-hearted lyrics, helped set them very much apart from the rest of the genre.

“We became THE ADICTS because The Pinz was such a shit name,” deadpans Kid. “At the early gigs we just used to wear punk clothes, but never anything bought, like those posers who went down to Kings Road. After a while though, black came in and it all became boring, so we started to dress in white to be different, and ‘Clockwork Orange’ had been a major influence on us, though not for the violence, more the teenage angst…”

“The ‘Clockie’ thing didn’t really evolve until about 78/79 ‘Songs Of Praise’ came out in 1981,” reckons Monkey. “And the image is an amalgam of many things. It may have been a conscious effort to set ourselves against the somewhat unimaginative appearance of early ’80s punk bands or just a perception that looking a certain way might be interesting and entertaining.

We got some stick from some of the self-appointed ‘real’ punk bands for not being punk enough, or whatever, but I don’t remember anyone really making an issue of the image… other than saying I must be a poof!”But before the aforementioned ‘Songs Of Praise’ debut album, the band spent several years gigging and building up a strong local following. They even managed, after their very first London show, at The Brecknock, to secure an – albeit basic, to say the least – deal with Dining Out Records, who released the ‘Lunch With THE ADICTS‘ EP in 1979. It was a scintillating, cock-sure debut, surprisingly well executed for an opening gambit, and featured four songs, two of which remain constants in the band’s live set even today: the pounding mid-tempo ‘Easy Way Out’ and the irresistible ‘Straight Jacket’.

It was always going to be different. Regardless of what ended up happening between Strung Out’s previous record—2019’s Songs Of Armor And Devotion—and this new collection of songs, it was always the band’s intention to step away from themselves a little bit with it. Although Dead Rebellion­—the band’s 10th album of their remarkable 35 year career—was written during the height of the pandemic and is, as all Strung Out albums have been, a reaction to the world at large and their own personal experiences within it, the band had already decided to end that chapter before Covid. A new beginning had long been in the works. 
“We got to that point where I felt like if we kept going we’d be repeating ourselves,” explains vocalist Jason Cruz. “And you know, we’re a fucking metal band—a punk metal band—and there’s only so much you can do before people start writing you off as losing your roots or whatever. We all have side projects, so we use those to go into left-field, but I think that this is the most we can do and keep our fan base and actually take them in just a little bit of a slightly different direction. It’s more mid-tempo and more heavy, less worrying about speed. We were trying to be more melodic.”

That’s not to say these 12 songs don’t pack a punch, but, at the same time, the way the five-piece—these days completed by guitarists (and founding members) Jake Kiley and Rob Ramos, bassist Chris Aiken and drummer Daniel Blume—focus on melody over riffs is definitely noticeable. Take, for instance, the way opener “Future Ghosts” begins in a frenzy of riffs and drumbeats before settling into a kind of hypnotic aggression, or how the frenetic undercurrent of “White Owls” quietens down, its power condensed into a hushed whisper before once again soaring off in an impassioned burst of emotion. Similarly, “Life You Bleed”—one of many requiems here for modern living—tiptoes quietly at first but then accelerates into a fully-fledged rock anthem.

Elsewhere, “Cages” is a vicious indictment of the fractious, polarized and technology-driven nature of society, while “Empire Down” is a self-reflective ode about living up to the pressures and expectations of being in this band. ‘We are the orphans of a revolution song,’ sings Cruz; elsewhere in the song, he quotes the chorus of the 1964 Nina Simone song, ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’. When the album ends a few tracks later with the breakneck (yet still melodic) intensity of ‘Plastic Skeletons’, Cruz returns to the importance of that same revolution song. ‘Everybody dancing for applause,’ he sings, ‘when the song is how we rise above.’
“People always talk shit about religious people and spirituality,” says Cruz, “like ‘Oh, you believe in a man in the sky.’ But then the same people come up to me and look to me like I, or my songs, have the answers to their questions. Because everyone’s looking for something, everybody needs something. Sometimes, as a dad and as a husband, I wish I could call my dad or somebody and just ask ‘What the fuck do I do here?’ Everybody needs a Northern star. So while those two lines kind of contradict each other, at the same time they lend to each other that we’re all just looking for something and we all put our belief in something, no matter how ridiculous or superstitious it is. And those things can let you down, but they also can rise you up.”

Regardless of the pressure it may have put on the band, and despite Cruz’s insecurity that being a Northern star could let people down, Strung Out’s songs have been lifting people up for three-and-a-half decades now. Dead Rebellion is no different. In a world that Cruz sees as incredibly divided, one that—as he outlines on the afore-mentioned “Cages”—sees people constantly building what he calls “ideological walls” around each other, his hopes are this record can help tear them down.
“The key to this record,” says Cruz, “is technology and divisiveness—divisive language, divisive attitudes, divisive ideologies. I feel I was abandoned in a way, by a lot of things. What happened to bringing people together? I thought that that’s what we started doing this for. It’s still a huge part of who I am and it seeps into the lyrics - trying to just find some common ground with people again and remind people that we’re all the fucking same. At the end of the day, when the lights go out, we all want the same thing. And that’s where the title Dead Rebellion came from - like, we got so far and here we are right back again, just fragmented and at each other’s throats constantly.”

That, then, is the crux of Dead Rebellion. Produced, mixed and recorded by Shawn McGee at Artistry Recording Studio in Las Vegas, it might represent a new chapter for Strung Out, but it’s guided by the same principles that have always driven them. And while Cruz he says he’s never thought of Strung Out as political band, this record—like all Strung Out records—has captured the zeitgeist and the self-destructive political climate, especially in the USA, perfectly.
“I struggle with the political thing,” says Cruz. “I don’t think we’re political. I think we’re just human. We’re a bunch of guys who are like everybody else. We’re not that smart. We’re just five guys that had nothing in common and we’ve proved to the world that you can come together and make something beautiful if you put your bullshit aside. It’s as simple as that.”

Overtly political or otherwise, Dead Rebellion is nevertheless a record informed by and reacting to the world we live in, as well as all the experience and wisdom that Cruz has attained over the years. It’s also one built on the unwavering principles that the band have had at their core from the very beginning. So while Cruz hopes that it can help unify people, he’s more than aware that that’s very likely too much to ask. But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try.
“I know that’s not going to happen,” he admits. “We’re too far gone. There’s a saying ‘You can never go back home’, and I feel like the horses are out the stable and they’re running wild. So this is my declaration of war, in a way—a war to stay true and to just go down like the person I know I am, to stay true to myself and to stay true to my brothers--and go down believing what I know is right, to look people in the eye and give them a chance, and to listen and to try my best to bring people together. And that’s the that’s the hill that I’m going to die on.”