The Offspring

Let The Bad Times Roll

CONCORD SoCal punks dig deep for their tenth album.

They’re quite the conundrum, The Offspring. Here’s Dexter Holland, brain the size of a planet, PhD in molecular biology, yet they’ve been responsible for some of the most gleefully dumb songs of the past three decades, Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) and a recent cover of Joe Exotic’s Here Kitty, Kitty very much included.

There is a genuine darkness at play on their tenth album, though. Long delayed (they started work on it in 2013), it’s been percolating all the way through the Trump presidency, BLM and covid, so the darkerthan-usual edge is no coincidence. The ultra-catchy pop-punk of old is there in spades, but they’re taking a cold hard look at America on This Is Not Utopia. And amid all the fullpelt bluster, Gone Away Requiem

is a jarring, mournful, Mad Worldstyle tribute to a lost loved one.

Not all the gambles pay off. A rock take on Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King is less original than they might imagine – everyone from The Who to

The Wombles has done it – while We Never Have Sex Anymore’s

lounge-lizard ode to middle-aged angst is basically Victoria

Wood’s Ballad Of Barry And Freda

in a pair of Dickies shorts.

A fun romp with a serious undercurrent, then, and a reminder that there’s just one man on the Warped Tour who can save us all when the next pandemic hits. ■■■■■■■■■■