Descendents frontman Milo Aukerman confirmed in an interview with OC Register that a new album from the band is on the way. Fans had to wait nine years for 1996’s Everything Sucks, eight years for 2004’s Cool to Be You and then twelve years for 2016’s Hypercaffium Spazzinate, but Milo promises that it won’t be too long before the next record arrives.

He’s quoted as saying, “When we put out the last record we thought, ‘OK, I bet we could put out another record after this one and not wait a decade to do it.’ It was such a rewarding experience and you know what? Our fans deserve better. They deserve more than a record every decade or so. We started writing almost immediately after that record was done. I have been writing and Stephen (Egerton) has really picked up the mantle, too. Between us I think we have like 20 songs written and Bill (Stevenson) and Karl (Alvarez) have been writing songs as well. We’ve done some basic tracking, but it’s still a work in progress but I hope we’ll have something out by the end of the year.”

We’ll keep you posted as more details on the next Descendents record come to light.

Jawbreaker drummer Adam Pfahler confirmed in a recent interview with Music Radar that new music for what will be the band’s first album in over two decades is in progress. He was quoted as saying:

“Yeah, absolutely. We’re writing right now and we’ve rescued a couple of old songs that we never had a chance to record right at the end of the band. We’re going to get together in San Francisco and get right back to it. We don’t have a label yet, and we haven’t booked any studio time. We’re just dipping our toes and taking it one step at a time.”

Jawbreaker broke up in 1996, shortly after the release of their iconic record Dear You, but reunited in 2017 and have been performing live occasionally since then.

With no less than thirteen new names the regular Jera On Air 2019 line-up is almost complete! Next to this, the three-day festival in Northern Limburg’s Ysselsteyn will start to impress during the free Pre Party on Thursday June 27th.

During this evening we are going to see no other than Bury Tomorrow, Shvpes and Our Hollow Our Home opening the festival. A fourth name will be added as well. We also decided to strengthen the entire program: so next to the aforementioned acts, we also managed to book Madball, Cancer Bats, Bleed from Within, Risk it!, Palm Reader, This is Hell, Drug Church, Backfire!, Brutus and Regulate as part of the already impressive Jera On Air line-up.

Weeks ago the biggest alternative festival of the Netherlands announced Parkway Drive, Sum 41, Heideroosjes and Hatebreed and the new Friday headliner will be announced next week! And as if that is not enough already, some other fantastic elements will be added to the festival soon including some bands and a DJ stage. All information about the line-up and ticket sales can be found at www.jeraonair.nl.

This summer will be the third time Jera On Air will celebrate for three long days. It characterizes the enormous growth Jera On Air has gone through. The festival has steadily grown from one to two days, making the step to a three day event a few years ago. The free Pre Party on Thursday is gaining popularity each year. This growth will continue the coming edition now we have secured some of the biggest names in the alternative scene.

We have seen the metalcore bosses of Bury Tomorrow at Jera On Air before. In 2016 and 2018 the Brits rocked the stage. Bury Tomorrow will never bore you. What a huge amount of energy they produce and convey during their shows! Last year their album Black Flame could count on solely positive reviews. Next to Bury Tomorrow, also Shvpes and Our Hollow Our Home will open the festival on Thursday. One more name will be added to the Pre Party line-up soon.

The fans will not only be surprised by the announcement of some new gems on Thursday. During the other two days the visitors can look forward to Madball and Cancer Bats. The first is known as one of the founders of New York Hardcore (NYHC). The band is going to celebrate their 30th year anniversary at Jera On Air, but still they are fresher and more innovative than ever before. The Canadian Cancer Bats always seem to fascinate with their sharp mix of heavy metal, hardcore and punkrock. Next to these, the names of the Limburgian Backfire! with a special memorial show, Bleed from within, Risk it!, Palm Reader, This is Hell, Our Hollow Our Home, Regulate, Shvpes and Drug Church have been confirmed.

Unfortunately, we also have some bad news: Hundredth had to cancel their tour recently. This also includes their planned show at Jera On Air. Luckily we immediately found a great replacement in the Belgian Brutus.

Well this is a pretty cool opportunity if you’re in the Boston area (because we don’t have enough cool things going on here)!

As you probably know by now, the great Frank Turner will be holding the third installment of his Lost Evenings shows in Boston, Massachusetts, in a couple months. The four-night run of sold-out shows at House Of Blues features a different theme each night. The final night, May 19th, has been dubbed the Xtra Mile Night, and finds Turner teaming up with his long-running UK-based label hosting a handful of Xtra Mile Recordings vets like Against Me!, Skinny Lister and Trapper Schoep as openers. They’ve also announced a contest that will allow a kick-ass opening band a chance to kick the festivities off. Think you’ve got what it takes? Head here to find out how you and your band can enter!

Turner recently wrapped recording sessions for his eight studio album, which will serve as follow-up to last year’s Be More Kind.

April 1st is going to be a good day for punk rock… “Why?” you ask… Stream Exhibit A (with full story) below.  [Read more…]

Rhode Island punks Follow Thru are streaming their debut EP Play Hard, Play Fast, Play First. It is three songs that harken back to the sounds of early 2000’s Midwest/Gainesville punk.

Intrigued? Check out the stream below.

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Summer festival season is rapidly approaching in the United States, and for the second year in a row, legendary photographer (and underrated bluesman) Danny Clinch has got himself a good one in the works. It’s called Sea.Hear.Now, and it takes place quite literally right on the beach in Asbury Park. This year’s festivities are going down on September 20th and 21st, and while the festival’s larger headliners include Dave Matthews Band and The Lumineers, it also includes a steady diet of punk-friendly musical fare, with bands like Dropkick Murphys, Bad Religion, Dave Hause and the Mermaid, Beach Rats and the incomparable Joan Jett and the Blackhearts scheduled to take the stage. Check out the full lineup, including details on the festival’s surf competition, on the tour poster below.

Ticket info for Sea.Hear.Now is available right here.

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So long, Racquet Club; we hardly knew ye!

The LA-based quartet that featured members of myriad other highly-respected bands like The Jealous Sound, Samiam, and Knapsack, announced via their various social media accounts that they’ve decided to call it quits by simply stating: “Still friends forever, thanks for everything.”

In lieu of further parting words, the band left behind three live videos, filmed during their last run through Brooklyn. You can check them out here.

Racquet Club’s debut – and as it turns out final – album was their self-titled 2017 full length, released on Rise Records.

The journey of a career songwriter is one filled with a seemingly endless series of what can rightly be called “pivotal” moments that can alter the arc of one’s professional career; the death of a loved one, the dissolution of a band, divorce, the misuse of alcohol and other drugs, marriage, worsening societal ills. Even if you’ve got your head screwed on in a manner we’d call straight, each and every one of those areas can seem daunting. When you couple any of them with the growing senses of fear and doubt and insecurity that can come, frankly, with being alive and even remotely paying attention to the world around you, it can prove enough to bring an otherwise strong individual to their respective knees.

In one form or another, Dave Hause has tackled all of those issues — sometimes individually, sometimes collectively — generally in a manner that can be poignant and heart-achingly personal. On his upcoming album, Kick, due April 12th on Rise Records, Hause has yet another filter to approach his life, and his craft, through: fatherhood. When we caught up with the now California-based Hause over the phone last week, he was out for a walk with his twin two-month-old sons napping quietly away in their stroller, affording his wife a much-deserved breather. Lest those who might be afraid that turning 40 and establishing roots on the sun-soaked west coast and becoming a dad would have dulled the daggers that Hause spent the better part of two decades sharpening, fear not; Kick is very much a return to form from the more positive, upbeat themes of its predecessor, Bury Me In Philly. “I think that Kick and Devour are a lot closer to one another than Bury Me In Philly,” Hause explains. “Bury Me In Philly was me moving to California and figuring out what that was going to look like and figuring out happiness. I didn’t want to write a bummed record if I wasn’t bummed. Little did I know that we were going to have one of the biggest heartbreaks as a society that I could have ever predicted.”

There are some weighty questions posited over the course of the ten songs that make up Kick. Many of them, like “Weathervane” and “Civil Lies” and lead single “The Ditch” tangle the wires between the personal and the political and reveal the obviously delicate balances that come with managing one’s own anxieties within the context of tides that are literally rising and a social climate that seems hellbent on allowing it to happen. The ride culminates in the album’s closing track, “Bearing Down,” a track which…well, let’s put it this way: if the Devour track “Autism Vaccine Blues” and its narrator outwardly considering whether or not they’d be better off dead tugged on your heartstrings, “Bearing Down” will use two hands and rip those heartstrings straight from your chest. The song finds Hause not only name-checking Hunter Thompson and Robin Williams (and insanely talented Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison, who provided backing vocal duties on the Devour track “The Shine,” in the liner notes), all of whom died from suicide after lengthy and sometimes public struggles with their own demons, but contemplating his own oblivion and weighing swan diving off the Golden Gate Bridge.

But then comes the pivot, that moment that the narrative shifts from being bleak to being heavy yet hopeful by way of our narrator finding that he’s got a newfound responsibility to be around for a while, and to help those that he’s close to through these difficult times. “What I was betting on with that final verse,” he explains, “was really like the old Buddhist philosophy that life is pain. “Hallelujah, we’re alive, and it’s bearing down.“ It is brutal. And if I can lighten that load for someone else, then I’m serving some grander purpose more than just my own selfish whims.” If you’re lucking, the act of older and going through some of your own trials and tribulations allows you the experience and perspective needed to learn from past mistakes. “I’ve got to stick around and not put my people through hell,” Hause notes, adding “in looking at the patterns of addiction and stuff, you start to realize that ‘wow…I’ve made some messes that I wouldn’t mind not repeating, so I’m going to stay in better touch!’ I look at it as more of a human responsibility.”

If there’s a central theme to Kick, it’s that yeah, the current might be strengthening around us or the ditch we’re in may be getting deeper, but that focusing on that isn’t going to fix it. “It’s a very dangerous proposition to look at the glass as either half-empty or filled with piss! Maybe that could be true, but I can’t really afford to ruminate on that. I have to come up with a reason to look toward the shore despite feeling I or we, collectively, are drowning. I have to. At this point, it’s a job as I have as a dad,” Hause notes, quickly adding that, upon reflection, his new duties aren’t necessarily “new” at all, though they’re certainly more intense. “To some degree, I’ve always had that job. I’ve been a brother and a husband and a friend and a songwriter. I’m supposed to try to be of some good use to people.”

There’s a genuine art to being able to write a song that uses your own uniquely human experiences and resonates with other people in such a way that not only can the listener relate to your stories, but use them in a way that can move the needle in their own lives. “You know the Leonard Cohen quote “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in?” Hause asks, knowing full well what the answer is. “A lot of times what’s compelling to me is trying to look at the piece of pottery and trying to recognize that it is indeed cracked — and we cracked it! We fucked it up!  — But then trying to find that light, because what else are you going to do? A joking alternate title for the record was “Suicidally Optimistic,” and I know that can kinda make the skin crawl, but a lot of times, I think that that’s my outlook.”

As was the case with Bury Me In Philly a few years ago, Hause was joined by his brother Tim for the creation of Kick. The latter might be sixteen years younger than his big brother, but make no mistake; he is not, by any stretch (and to paraphrase a line from the track “Civil Lies”) a kid anymore, displaying songwriting chops that match his previously-established guitar abilities. “Having Tim as my partner now is clutch. His whole theory is that you make a ten song record, and then, long-term, if you end up with three of them in your “greatest hits” set that we’ll play for the remainder of our careers as musicians, we did something right.” Tim not only collaborated on music and lyrics this time out, he takes on lead vocal duties on “Civil Lies,” providing an effect that’s familiar while still adding a layer we haven’t heard on a Hause “solo” album before. I use solo in quotes there, because it may not be that way for long. “I didn’t really want to be a solo guy (at first),” Hause the elder explains. “The financial collapse happened and I grabbed a guitar and just went. I didn’t realize (it would happen this way), I thought I’d be back with The Loved Ones after a record or two, but the cookie crumbled differently. I brought my brother in and assumed he’d be with me for a year or two and then go back to college.” Instead, Tim has turned himself into a vital cog in the process. “I think we’re just continuing to set the table for us combining streams and using both of our songwriting output and both of our talents toward the same end. Ultimately, we may just go completely under the last name so that it encompasses all of our writing,” a trend that’s started already, as evidenced by Kick‘s cover art. 

While Hause will have Tim alongside him as he gears up to hit the road with a full band, The Mermaid, for the first Kick support shows later this week and through the remainder of the year, he obviously won’t have his family’s two newest members alongside. In order to gear up for life on the road as a dad, Hause has called on some old friends like Dan Andriano, Pete Steinkopf, Brian Fallon and Cory Branan not just for songwriting input, but for advice on how to best navigate these previously (for him) uncharted waters. While being away from his wife and two little fellas is obviously going to suck, Hause is hoping to use that as inspiration to dig a little deeper – as though that were possible – in his live performances. “I’m going to miss my family. I’m going to feel to some degree like a heel for not being there for first steps or things. I’m going to miss stuff if I continue to tour to support my life. But I’m trying to look at it like a two-pronged approach: 1 – what I do is cool and the kids will be psyched on that and 2- more importantly, if I can lean into that experience and be like ‘well, I’m in Berlin, and I don’t get to do this just willy-nilly; I can’t just pick up and go, it takes a tremendous amount of planning and effort and heartache to be away from my family, I’m going to really dig in on this Berlin show…or these two Boston shows.’ I think maybe it’ll make things shine up a little brighter.”

The new tour kicks off tomorrow (March 27th) in Hause’s hometown of Santa Barbara and takes a baby-steps approach through places like Boston, Philly, New York and Toronto before making its way overseas for three weeks later next month. Tour dates are available here. Kick is due out April 12th, and you can still pre-order it here.

More importantly, you can check out our full chat below; Hause and I have done these a few times, so as usual, we range pretty far and wide.

[Read more…]