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They’ve toured the world countless times. They kept the leather jacket-and-Converse look alive through an increasingly neon landscape. They’ve written songs about KISS, Top Gun and Minecraft. Hell, they’ve even been on CNN a few times! Please welcome back to the spotlight Wyoming’s own Teenage Bottlerocket, whose ninth album, the 12-track Sick Sesh! — traffic-cone-orange cover art and all — will be released 08/27/2021 on Fat Wreck Chords.

“This record is 12 songs because 14 was too long,” cracks vocalist/guitarist Ray Carlisle. “We wanna keep the energy up.”

Recorded in November 2020 at the Blasting Room (the band’s eighth straight full-length with producer Andrew Berlin), Sick Sesh! is a little bit rougher around the edges than the last few TBR albums, from the haunting “Statistic” to the panic-inducing “Strung Out On Stress” to the buzzsaw lead of “Semi Truck.” According to Carlisle, that was on purpose.

“We spent a lot of time on guitar tones this time around — that was important for us,” he says. ““We made sure to bring the noisy, loud, irritate your fuckin’ mom guitar back. There’s a ton of intentional guitar noise and feedback. We dug up the amps we used for Freak Out! and They Came From The Shadows. This is punk rock, after all. Stay Rad! Is a great record, but it’s very radio friendly. I wanted to do the opposite of that: Let’s get fuckin’ noisy.”

While the bulk of Sick Sesh! was written in January 2020 (with “Statistic” actually co-written between Carlisle and his son Milo), the COVID pandemic allowed for the band to take a little extra time for fine tuning, and the resulting tracks are some of the most stylistically diverse on the record. First up, there’s the Templeman-penned “Strung Out On Stress,” the fastest, angriest track on Sick Sesh!, all about losing your mind during the pandemic. On the flipside, there’s the mid-tempo, melodic track “The Squirrel,” written by bassist Miguel Chen and sung by Templeman, that’s literally about a cute little rodent.

“He had too much time on his hands during the pandemic,” Carlisle jokes. “How did it become a Teenage Bottlerocket song? I’m not sure. But it has the best guitar lead we’ve ever written!”

Chen also wrote the infectious sing-along “Ghost Story” as well as the album-closing “Moving On,” which marks the first time Carlisle has ever sung Chen’s lyrics on a Teenage Bottlerocket album. The song, about the bassist’s decision to move from his hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, to Texas to be with his ailing father, demonstrates a new side of Teenage Bottlerocket that’s reflective, wistful and dare we say a little mature. (“It felt good to sing that one,” says Carlisle.)

With more than 100 original songs already in their catalog, how does the band stay motivated when they’re eight records deep?

“We’re always in competition with ourselves,” Carlisle explains. “The real competition is between me and Kody. It’s like, ‘You wrote a song that destroys everything else on this record. Let me try to do that to you real quick. How’s that feel?” And then he comes back and one ups me.

“It’s all about the songs,” he continues. “The songs carry this record all the way. That’s not to say there are bad songs on our other records — we have a hard time releasing a shitty song. But these songs are especially great. You know ALL’s best-of record where Allroy is dissecting a musical note? I felt we kind of tapped into that record in a great way, not in a ‘Oh no, they’re experimental now!’ way. This is a Teenage Bottlerocket record through and through, but there’s a lot of hidden elements.”

Carlisle’s pride about Sick Sesh! is obvious, but he’s not the only one who loves the album. 

“Fat Mike called me and said, ‘Hey, this is your best record,” Carlisle recalls. “I said, ‘Cool, thanks for noticing.’”

With Sick Sesh! ready to drop, Teenage Bottlerocket will return to the road once more throughout 2021 and beyond, and you can expect to hear plenty of new tracks peppered into their already high-energy sets. Given that the band is already two decades old, however, is there any chance of the band slowing down? Carlisle shoots that idea down right away.

“I want to have the best next 10 years,” the singer says. “We’ve grinded the grind. Now we get to actually enjoy being a band, and not think too much about different ways to try and ‘make it.’ We’re riding this wave we built ourselves. I wanna surf it for another 10 years.”

Well there you have it: The three things in life can always count on are death, taxes and Teenage Bottlerocket. But before Carlisle signs off, he has a question for all the fans out there,

“What’s your favorite Teenage Bottlerocket song?” he asks. “Bzzt! Wrong answer. It’s on this record, you just haven’t heard it yet.”

The year is 2021. America is still fighting its way through an ongoing pandemic, currently fueled by the ignorance of millions who have decided science isn’t good enough for them. Countless lives have been lost or disrupted by an inefficient government loaded with corrupt politicians, egged on by snake oil salesmen who are inexplicably given nightly platforms on cable TV or allowed to spread their disinformation through social media. Make no mistake: Rome is burning. We are fiddling.

Pissed off yet? So is The Last Gang. This California punk quartet had big plans for 2020, with a seemingly endless string of tour dates keeping them on the road in support of their Fat Wreck Chords debut, Keep Them Counting. Crowds were getting bigger. Sing-alongs were getting louder. Spirits were getting higher. The only problem? The band was trying to write a new record simultaneously, and it wasn’t going well.

“Our downfall is we want to tour a lot, but it’s sometimes hard for us to write because it takes so much out of me,” begins frontwoman Brenna Red. When the world came to a standstill in March 2020, it was actually a blessing in disguise for Red. She could finally focus on everything happening outside of their tour van — and she quickly realized it wasn’t pretty.

“Because COVID happened, I was allowed to not rush, and we stepped back and re-wrote songs,” she explains. “Then I went to Fat Mike’s to write with him, and he challenged me to write more Clash-influenced reggae. I listened to London Calling to get inspired, but I think Joe Strummer once said if you want to be inspired, don’t listen to your idols — listen to your idols’ idols. So I also listened to a lot of Toots And The Maytals and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, and a ton of Trojan Records compilations.”

One listen to Noise Noise Noise, and you’ll discover a band who has not only pushed their musical boundaries in new and unexpected ways, but a lyricist in Red who has unlocked a new side of herself, spitting barbs both personal and political at whoever might listen. We’re obviously punk at our core,” she says. “People expect to hear something, and that can become tedious and somewhat boring. But when you throw somebody a curveball, if they hate it, that’s fine. But more than likely, they’re gonna go, ‘What is this?’ and it’ll pull them more into the album.”

Noise Noise Noise is nothing if not full of curveballs. The album opens with the “Guns Of Brixton”-esque title track, the first of the album’s many forays into guitar upstrokes and elastic basslines. The next curveball comes in the very next track, “WFTW,” the rare punk song that’s four minutes long and feeling a little bit like Searching For A Former Clarity-era Against Me! with Red cramming as many syllables into her verses as humanly possible. It’s also one of many new songs elevated by lead guitarist Ken Aquino, making his recorded debut with the now-quartet.

“Ken is a great lead guitar player, but my huge thing I love about Ken is at his core, he’s a melody man — he can sing pretty,” she gushes. “He adds so much to our band.” Aquino, also used to work in the same studio as producer Cameron Webb (Motörhead, Sum 41), who just so happened to be behind the boards for Noise Noise Noise (which was also co-produced by NOFX’s Fat Mike and Useless ID’s Yotam Ben Horin). Red was thrilled to reunite with Webb, who previously produced Keep Them Counting. “I know he’s not going to let me sound bad,” she says. “He’s going to push me.”         

Look no further than “Shameless,” a true gem of the album, a melodic punk banger with Red turning in a career-best vocal performance. The curveballs keep coming deep into the tracklisting, with the sludgy 6/8 tune “Intelligence Is A Plague.” In it, Red fires salvo after salvo at the ignorant masses as well as the publications that prey upon them (marking what is probably the first time alt-right “news” outlet Breitbart has been name-checked in a song).

“It was inspired by this overwhelming feeling of ‘Why aren’t we listening to the people who can tell us how to fix these huge problems?’ COVID, climate change, you name it. To me, it’s like, ‘I don’t know what to do, so I’m going to listen to you.’ But those people don’t want to be humble. They’d rather be ignorant and feel like they’re right.”      

This gets to the crux of Noise Noise Noise: These songs speak to her, and she hopes they speak to you, too. “I write music just to be alive,” she concludes. “I hope there’s something that can be taken from it to make you feel that electricity inside of yourself, whether happiness, pain, bittersweet memories… Just pick apart the art and put it inside of your own life.”