Punk: dead? For years, fans have been adamantly proclaiming that it isn’t, while others — usually also fans — have sneeringly declared that rock’s most mohawked genre died long ago when Blink-182 rose to fame. But today, a new generation of punk rock artists have come along, inviting more and more fans into the world of leopard-print hair and swallow tattoos. But are these newcomers just fashion-hungry wieners, or is punk seeing its legacy continued?
On the latest episode of MoshTalks Cover Stories, Terry “Beez” Bezer talks to Dexter Holland and Noodles of pop-punk legends The Offspring. The trio discuss the band’s new album, Let The Bad Times Roll, which sees the “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” scribes challenging even their own winning formula.
“Since the last full-length, there was the Summer Nationals EP…it was a fast and a hard EP,” says Beez. “And then the follow up, ‘Coming For You,’ was like this baseball stadium-sized glam rock opus. Those two things going into a new record left me with kind of, What can the direction be? What will the direction be? And something that I think is cool about The Offspring in this era is, I don’t feel like there’s a textbook Offspring sound. Do you feel free when you write?”
“Yeah, for sure,” says Noodles. “We do feel free — and I think you’re right, there’s no textbook Offspring sound, but you know an Offspring song when you hear one. Isn’t that kind of weird? I don’t know that we could entirely account for that. I know what our thought process is in the studio, and mainly it’s, How can we make this song sound as good as we can? Generally with heavy guitar, bass, and drums. A lot of focus on making the guitar sound really good.”
Check out the full episode below:
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Words by Chris Krovatin
