Kept ’em separated

Yes, it’s been a while between albums from The Offspring. (They know.)

Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman knows what’s coming even before he calls to chat about The Offspring’s new record, “Let the Bad Times Roll,” its first album of new material in nearly nine years. What took you so long? “That’s been the first question in almost every interview,” Noodles says and laughs. “Fair enough. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, you know.

“We finished our deal with Sony, so we didn’t have anyone cracking the whip,” the band’s guitarist says. “We didn’t have any deadlines. Dexter [Holland, the band’s singer] went back to school, got his Ph.D. That took a little bit longer than he thought.”

Add to that the Orange County punk-pop band’s annual touring and the acrimonious departure of original bassist Greg Kriesel in 2018 and the band’s 10th album in more than 35 years together just took … a bit more time.

“We had been working in the studio, on and off, the whole nine years,” Noodles says. “Whenever Bob [Rock, the band’s producer] was in town, we’d hook up for a week or two in the studio. Sometimes as long as a month. The record didn’t really start coming together until a couple of years ago when we just had a really creative period.”

“Let the Bad Times Roll” displays all the familiar strengths of the Offspring, from Holland’s vocals to Noodles’ crunchy riffing and the strong melodies throughout, across a dozen songs that feel both fresh and familiar.

Given its lengthy gestation, it’s not surprising that some bits and pieces had been in the works for years, according to Noodles. “Coming For You,” for instance, was released as the album’s first single, complete with a music video of a clown fight club, six years before the album finally arrived.

“That’s certainly the oldest one that was finished,” Noodles says. “Some of the songs are older than that. Like ‘We Never Have Sex Anymore’ — it’s probably a 20-year-old song but it’s changed a lot. The skeleton was there but the meat and bones, the meat and potatoes part of it has been fleshed out.

“And then some of the songs we steal from older stuff even before Offspring,” he says. “There’s a guitar break on ‘Hassan Chop’ that predates, I think, us being called the Offspring. That comes back to our Manic Subsidal days.

“Took us about 35 years to get it right, but I think we finally nailed it in this take.”

The album is rewardingly diverse in both sound and lyrics, something Noodles says came about through the long process of picking which songs to include and what order to run them. The album opens with the one-two punch of “This

Is Not Utopia” and the current single “Let the Bad Times Roll,” both of which are about as political as the Offspring gets, offering critiques of sociopolitical dysfunction wrapped — in the case of the title track — in catchy singalong melodies.

“Without having to take sides politically, I don’t think anybody has been enjoying the last four years,” Noodles says of the title track. “I think everyone’s a little wound up by it. And it’s really just an observation of what we’ve seen. “And then something like ‘This Is Not Utopia’ is far more like, ‘Ah, man, the world, evil people are at odds,’ “he says. “Ultimately in that song it’s, ‘When will love finally conquer hate?’

Which we kind of think eventually it will. We try to provide some hope it’s not just all doom and gloom.”

“We Never Have Sex Anymore,” a fun take on the waning of passion, is one of the jazziest numbers the Offspring has ever done, complete with a horn section to accentuate the swinging feel. “Hassan Chop” is an old-school blast of highspeed punk. There’s even an Offspringized cover of classical composer Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” here.

The penultimate track, a gentle, piano-based reboot of “Gone Away,” originally on 1997’s “Ixnay on the Hombre,” was done as a sort of musical gift for longtime fans.