My apologies for being unable to write the “Biggest Albums of March 2021” round up. I’ve spent lockdown changing career paths and my law exams made that column an impossibility. Not to worry, rather than simple rolling on to April, 411 is back with a bumper round-up of the biggest name and most intriguing releases from March and April.
Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over The Country Club (Pop)
Norman Fucking Rockwell could not be topped. The bad-boy, West Coast, American Dream overdosing on excess mythology that Lana Del Rey had been sculpting since her debut came to a glorious head on that one façade shattering album. Lana was recast as Slyvia Path roaming around in her fucking night gown writing on the walls in her own blood – where on earth can you go from there? The answer, it seems, is to go back to the very beginning.
The 20 greatest The Offspring songs – ranked
From 1989’s self-titled LP to Ixnay On The Hombre and beyond, we rank the Californian punk-rock legends’ biggest tunes…
Words: Sam Law
So ubiquitous have The Offspring been as mainstream punk heavyweights over the last three decades that, when reminded that latest album Let The Bad Times Roll is their first in nine years, many fans would struggle to believe they’ve been away at all. That’s largely due to the strength of a back-catalogue whose songs somehow feel simultaneously ageless and emblematic of their specific moments in time. Every rock fan worth their tattered T‑shirt will instantly recognise the spring-loaded slapstick of Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) or Come Out And Play’s weird Eastern-inflected riff. Hell, even obscure deep-cuts like Kill The President and Get It Right (neither of which make this list) have a habit of cropping up as notable milestones in conversations surrounding punk’s re-emergence as
Kurt Cobain died by his own hand April 5.
The
alternative nation’s voice was suddenly, shockingly stilled. After three years of the most popular music being an agonized scream over heavy guitars, people wanted something shinier and more upbeat. But they didn’t want to lose the overamplified six-strings and acknowledgment that life was complicated and messy.
Dookie had that in spades. Now
grunge aside and finally dominated rock culture as it threatened to in 1977. A third of these records reflected pop-punk’s commercial ascendance.
Also, three of 1994’s best punk albums rang with resonances of death, despite all songs having been written (in some cases)
Let The Bad Times Roll, their much-anticipated 10
th album, is out today
Today, the legendary punk rock band, The Offspring, are releasing their first album in almost a decade.
Let The Bad Times Roll, the band’s 10
th album, was recorded over the last several years and sees the band once again collaborate with the world-renowned producer, Bob Rock. To mark this huge milestone, World of Tanks are bringing back their The Offspring-related in-game content!
Given numerous The Offspring fans among the 160-million audience of World of Tanks, the collaboration of the two was just a matter of time. First, it happened in 2019 when the members of the band were added to the game, alongside a truly punk-rock tank, and they even headlined Wargaming Fest in Minsk, Belarus. For those who couldn’t make it to the capital, The Offspring as animated in-game models performed a setlist featuring a collection of classics in the World of Tanks garage, meaning no one had to miss out.
The story of The Offspring in 10 songs
Dexter Holland and Noodles guide us through The Offspring’s musical history – from mainstream mega-hits to all-out punk ragers.
Words: Ian Winwood
With a good-natured laugh, Dexter Holland recalls that “so many people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I thought your band’s music was really happy – until I read the lyrics’”. Sometimes maligned, often misunderstood, for almost 40 years The Offspring have been a standard-bearer for the kind of American punk rock that cracked the U.S. mainstream in the middle years of the ’90s. In this, the group from Orange County played as pivotal a role as any; released in 1994, to this day their third LP, Smash, remains the highest-selling independent rock release of all time.