Let The Bad Times Roll

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The sound is unmistakable. Since emerging out of the Southern California hardcore scene in the 1980s, The Offspring’s melodious punk has distinguished itself from their contemporaries’, due in large part to frontman Dexter Holland’s tenor. It’s sour, snotty, and sardonic, the perfect foil to his group’s penchant for hard, fast, loud sounds: chunky riffs, brash drums, heavy cymbals. In the band’s 37-year career, that sense of urgency has never wavered, and has only become exacerbated by Trumpism. Enter <i>Let the Bad Times Roll</i>, The Offspring’s 10th studio album and first full-length in nine years. “I definitely don't consider us a political band, but, shoot, how could you write an album and not talk about what's been going on over the last couple of years?” Dexter Holland tells Apple Music. “We have leaders that don't seem to want to solve the problems of the world, they want to incite them. The bad times are still rolling.” But the group’s satirical charms prevent any overt moralizing: There’s swinging trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, and trumpet on “We Never Have Sex Anymore,” there’s a piano ballad rendition of an Offspring classic (“Gone Away”)—hell, there’s even a punk cover of an 1875 orchestral piece. “The songs all deal with different social issues—mental illness or addiction or the state of the world,” Holland says. “But it’s not just enough to bitch. The message of the album is hope.” Wise words from one of the best-selling punk bands of all time. Below, Holland details the album, track by track. <b>“This Is Not Utopia”</b> “We wrote a song called 'Shit Is Fucked Up,' but that was nothing—check out now! To me, the song sounds like it's about the rioting that was going on last summer, but I actually finished it in April, so it was before that. It wasn't like I predicted it or anything, but there was a sense that this stuff was bubbling. It was ready to spill over. People are oppressed, and they're feeling it, and they're striking out.” <b>“Let the Bad Times Roll”</b> “We could have written a song called 'Trump Is a Shithead' or whatever, but that would have been too easy. There's more going on than just that. And it's too bad that we're at that point. [The lyric] 'Machiavelli flow,' to me, is a leader saying whatever they want to say to get into office and then totally screwing everybody over once they get there. Give me the dignity of patronizing me. Now, it's just like, 'Oh, fuck you, figure it out.' The verses are rocking, they’re pretty heavy, and then it goes to this light chorus, almost like a musical coping mechanism.” <b>“Behind Your Walls”</b> “We’ve lost some band guys over the last several years. I wish I could talk to them again, and say, ‘Dude, what was going through your mind? Help me to understand what you were going through that was so bad that you wanted to take that way out.’ I had a good friend whose son committed suicide. And then all of a sudden, I looked at the song like, ‘Oh my god, it feels like I'm writing it for my friend,’ even though he was already dead. When I was growing up, these dark topics were part of what drew me to a lot of the bands that I liked: Punks weren't afraid to talk about depression. It helped." <b>“Army of One”</b> “This is a superhero song, right? ‘The world sucks and everything's stacked against me, but I'm going to put my head down and run as fast as I can, up through the wall, and try to get through it.’ Dig in when you know things are tough and try to have the self-resilience and confidence in yourself to make it through.” <b>“Breaking These Bones”</b> “I've lost some people in the last couple of years. When you're really low, you just want to be in your room. You want to shut the blinds. You want it to be black. You want to lay on your bed. And the feeling that grief can be so physical. It literally feels like it's crushing you, it's crushing your bones. I know most kids are going to listen that song and go, 'Oh, that sounds like a good moshing song.' That's fine too. Ultimately, I want people to be entertained. If they want to take a deeper look at the meaning of the lyrics, there's definitely some meaning there, but it's not required reading.” <b>“Coming for You”</b> “When we wrote [2015’s] ‘Coming for You,’ we were at a point where everyone was saying, ‘Why bother doing an album? Everyone just listens to the single anyway. Why don't you just put out singles?’ I liked the song. It was played on the radio. But it was never like officially released, I don't think. It felt unsatisfying. So we decided to not put out any more songs after that, and just finish the album. It still felt like 'Coming for You' belonged with the other songs on an album.” <b>“We Never Have Sex Anymore”</b> “That song existed just as a guitar song for a while, and then we started putting piano on it. I'd call it a swing song. I mean, we've got a clarinet at the end and crazy stuff; it was really fun, musically, to do it. I know it's coming out of left field for us, but we always try to throw a curveball on every record, something that you wouldn't expect. Maybe it's punk to not be punk.” <b>“In the Hall of the Mountain King”</b> “It's 60 seconds long. It's literally the classical song by Edvard Grieg set to a punk beat. We let it keep getting faster and faster until it imploded. It needed a couple of tweaks, so we came to set history straight. Look out, Mozart, you’re next.” <b>“The Opioid Diaries”</b> “The song is about addiction, of course, and that's not a new topic. But the reason I wanted to write this song is because I felt there was something unique going on in America, and that's the opioids, of course. The people becoming addicted aren't the people that you would normally expect to become addicted. It's the quarterback that got an injury. It's the blue-collar guy that hurt his back looking for some pain medication. Innocently enough, they’re getting prescribed stuff that they have no idea is highly addictive. It’s completely the fault of the pharmaceutical industry. They knew how addictive these medications are, and so patients start on these pills and then they either can't fill the prescription or can't afford it, and so they find themselves on heroin. They're ODing on heroin. We’re creating these accidental addicts.” <b>“Hassan Chop”</b> “Someone once told me, ‘I used to think your music was happy until I read your lyrics,’ but I think that's part of the formula. I wanted to write a song about what was going on in the Middle East, and ISIS in particular, just how brutal it's gotten over there. It’s beheadings. When I thought of the beheading thing, I thought, oh, that reminds me of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon ['Ali Baba Bunny'] where the guy runs around saying ‘Hassan chop,’ and so I decided to call the song that. No one knows what it is except for 50-year-old guys, but it was a great cartoon. [The song is about] how terrible it is over there, and not to point fingers, but to call it what it really is: a continuation of the Crusades. I mean, Jesus, it's the same stuff that's been going on for a couple thousand years: 'My God is right and your God sucks, and now I'm going to kill you for it.'” <b>“Gone Away”</b> “‘Gone Away’ is a song that I wrote for [the 1997 album] <i>Ixnay on the Hombre</i>. We'd been playing that song live for quite a while, but we wanted to have a moment in the set where there was a little break—have it be a piano and vocal thing, a moment in the show where you could catch a breath. So we started doing that and the lighters went up instantly. We were getting so many messages on social media saying, 'Where can I get the piano version of that song?' so we put it on the album. As a recording experience, it was weird, because I'm used to loud guitars covering up all my vocal flaws. It felt very vulnerable in an uncomfortable way. It took a little while to work through that in the studio.” <b>“Lullaby”</b> “‘Lullaby’ bookends the record and reminds you of the message of the record: Let the bad times roll. The topics are all subsidiary to the main overarching theme of these bad times. I imagine ‘Lullaby’ to be like…listening to a phonograph record. It's that final spiral in the middle that repeats over and over again. It’s a little theatrical.”

via Apple Music