In 2024, the Offspring could be forgiven if they want to take it easy and rest on their career achievements. After all, the Orange County natives have been playing together for 40 years, broke into the mainstream with Smash 30 years ago, and have effectively remained one of the biggest names in rock and punk ever since.

Yet the combination of vocalist/guitarist Dexter Holland and lead guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman isn’t content with coasting at the age when other long-running punk bands are hanging up their instruments. Instead, they’re releasing Supercharged, their 11th album which is a straightforward blast of their brand of rock and roll.

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The roots of the new album (out Oct. 11 on Concord Records) date back to before their last album, 2021’s Let the Bad Time Roll. Following a break from writing new music through the majority of the 2010s, the rockers — which also include bassist Todd Morse, multi-instrumentalist Jonah Nimoy, and drummer Brandon Pertzborn — put together that album just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic to shatter their plans. Without live shows to play, the band turned to their existing material for a source of inspiration.

“It felt like we entered a real creative period right before we finished Let the Bad Times Roll, and then the pandemic kind of sucked the life out of it,” Holland says from the bar of Chicago’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, just hours before their set at Riot Fest last month. “We got in the studio and went back over all the old songs, like ‘How are you strumming that? Let’s do this instead. What are the drums doing? Stick with the drums.’ We tightened everything up, and that helped us survive the pandemic without going crazy.”

That introspection and correction of bad habits in old tracks birthed ideas for new songs, further fueling the creative momentum the Southern California legends felt on their latest album. But for a band that prides itself on its live shows — and has consistently been playing the biggest stages around the world for decades — it’s taken the Offspring much of their career to find the perfect balance for their ideal studio life (or “the snake to my mongoose” as they quote Austin Powers).

“A lot of bands will go ‘OK, we’re going to set aside six months to do the next record, but it’s just too hard to do that for us,’ Noodles says. “You just get burned out and stuck on a song, so we’d go for a week or two at a time ever since we finished the last record and gradually put the album together.”

Musically, one of the biggest challenges for Holland and Noodles is finding new ways to experiment with their sound without completely changing direction. While many bands often want to move out of their original niche or get bored of their subgenre, the Offspring have released massive hits ranging from in-your-face punk rock (“Bad Habit,” “Hammerhead”) to their classic radio-friendly pop-punk (“Self Esteem,” “Come Out and Play”) to reggae-infused comedic hits (“Pretty Fly [for a White Guy],” “Why Don’t You Get a Job”) — meaning there aren’t too many adjacent territories they haven’t conquered.

“You’ve got to be different, but you’ve got to be the same — which is kind of an oxymoron,” Noodles says.

“You want to sound like yourselves, but you have to add something new to the equation that you haven’t done before,” Holland adds. “A good example of that is ‘You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid,’ because we hadn’t done a song quite like that before. It was a little bit different tempo and had some keyboard in it and stuff, so it’s something we look to when we say ‘OK, what are we going to do on this record that is different but the same?’ On this album, ‘Come to Brazil’ is completely different. We used to joke about it because we saw it on all of our social stuff, and it just cracked us up. We thought ‘Wait a minute, we have to write a song. Why hasn’t anyone done this? I just hope we get it out before someone else thinks of it.’ All we had was the title. There was no music, whereas usually it’s the other way around. So we designed the perfect song for Brazil — a speed metal verse, soccer stadium chant chorus and olé olé at the end.”

The result with Supercharged is an album that’s probably closer to Smash than anything they’ve done this century. It’s largely catchy rock anthem after catchy rock anthem and fits seamlessly into the Offspring’s catalog while also giving the band a renewed energy. Of course, that comparison also feels more timely seeing as the band celebrated their breakthrough album’s 30th anniversary at multiple big shows this year, and it also shows the growth the band has gone through over the years.

At this point, Holland has to think for a moment before he can even consider what else is left for the band to do stylistically (“I haven’t done a rock opera, and I don’t think we’ve done our Sgt. Pepper’s). But not being pigeonholed into one sound while continuing to fill up venues and festivals with fans old and young is a hard thing to complain about. And when it comes to discussing the timelessness of the album they’ve been celebrating all year, they’re quick to point out that not only have their shows always been a constant flow of (now multiple generations of) teenagers in the front of the crowd, but also their drummer wasn’t even born yet when Smash came out.

Clearly, they’re doing something right, and there’s no reason to think those same expectations won’t be met with Supercharged.

“We just hope it resonates with the fans, really,” Noodles says. “We’re still here, and we haven’t gone anywhere, so we just hope that we can keep creating music that people like.”

“We hope people just get a kick out of the record and we put some smiles on faces,” Holland adds. “That’s all we’re trying to do. We just want people to not feel so alone. If it’s a song that’s angry or expressing frustration, let’s share that too. We can do a whole gamut of emotions.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The eyes of music lovers are once again trained on Manchester, U.K., thanks to Noel and Liam Gallagher’s surprise, box office-busting Oasis reunion and former Smiths frontman Morrissey‘s comments about a proposed reunion with his long-estranged bandmate, Johnny Marr. As they’ve done for 42 years, Manchester rock outfit James are perfectly content to float above it all, and it sure seems to be paying some late-career dividends.

In April, the nine-piece, Tim Booth-led group improbably scored their second U.K. No. 1 album with Yummy, and first since the 1998 compilation The Best Of. Their iconic 1993 single “Laid” also enjoyed new life thanks to a memorable sync in season three of The Bear, and a high-profile performance at this summer’s Glastonbury festival demonstrated James’ multi-generational appeal.

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Now, the band are on tour in North America with Marr through Oct. 18 in St. Paul, Mn. — a full-circle flashback to James opening for the Smiths on their 1985 U.K. trek in support of Meat Is Murder. The Smiths were such big fans of James at the time that they even covered the band’s song “What’s the World?,” one of the only tunes they ever performed other than Morrissey/Marr originals.

James frontman Tim Booth hopped on Zoom with SPIN to reflect on the Manchester music scene of the early-to-mid 1980s, his long friendship with Marr and his original kinship with Morrissey, and what James can do now in 2024 that they couldn’t do decades ago.

You’re in the States with an old pal from your Manchester past. What are your memories of the early days of the Smiths, which line up pretty closely with the early days of James as well?

Tim Booth: Well, we were going for probably a year before the Smiths. I was invited to see them play at a club called Rafters. Johnny says it was about their fourth gig, and they were ready to go. We weren’t. We were like the guys who had stolen the equipment a few months earlier and were still learning how to play it. I was learning how to sing. The Smiths looked huge, which was the way they were. They had the charisma of a fully formed entity, even at that stage. When they broke, they asked us to support them at the Hacienda as this kind of hysteria was taking place across Britain around the Smiths. I got on really well with Morrissey and Johnny. I think Morrissey saw a kindred spirit with his vegetarian, meditating, no alcohol, no drugs thing. There was a kinship there. And yet, we were a working-class band, which was equally bizarre. We were really close for a number of years.

They took us on that 1985 tour and they bigged us up. Morrissey said we were the best band in the world. They tried to take us to America, but we actually turned them down. We thought that was a step too far for us. We knew we weren’t ready, so that was the last time we played with them. But they came to the studio when we were recording our first album, Stutter. I remember Morrissey and Johnny came and listened to our songs and said ‘Johnny Yen’ should be the single. They were right, but it wasn’t, and unfortunately we didn’t get to choose. I’d bump into them over the years. I was always really friendly for the next 10 years with Morrissey, but then it wasn’t so friendly. I can’t tell if it was because I started eating meat or what. He goes through people quite quickly and he started behaving differently to us. But it was very good in that time period and very sweet. I remember him as such a shy individual who really wanted success but was also very frightened of it, quite rightly. And Johnny was the grounded one. He was the one that kept the whole thing on track. I think he managed them for the last number of years.

The Manchester bands really helped each other, even though we were all making very different music. The Fall gave us our first gigs. New Order and the Smiths took us on tour. Later, we took out the Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, and Stone Roses. I would hope it was the same at CBGB with Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and the Ramones. There was something uniting them, which was a bloody minded individualism. It was similar in Manchester, in that they were all their own units and they got along.

The tour James did with the Smiths was when they were supporting Meat Is Murder, which was not only when they were at their most popular but also at a point when they weren’t destined to be a band for all that much longer. It must have been interesting to not only watch them on a nightly basis, but also observe how people were feeling that music so strongly.

It was surreal, because these were your friends and you were seeing them worshipped. It was very much like, I don’t understand this, but you could see it had its toll. It was my first encounter with people who were becoming famous.

And here they are then covering a James song in their own sets from time to time.

That was sweet, because that was the only song they ever covered. It was the first lyric I ever wrote for James. I remember Morrissey calling me to the house, asking me for the lyrics, him writing them down, and then watching his eyebrow arch when he could really make out what I was saying. We shared a love of Patti Smith, who has probably been the main inspiration for both of us becoming singers. He introduced me to Mary Margaret O’Hara’s music, which was a big, big deal to me. We used to go walking in graveyards, as was his want at that time. We have really great memories of that time, but we knew we weren’t ready. We didn’t want to do photos. We turned down the NME front cover. We didn’t really even want to make music — we wanted to play live. We felt that was the litmus test of a great band. Watching them become really famous, it was all a bit unreal. So, we just carried on rehearsing and getting bigger and bigger in a very underground way. Seven years later, we broke.

Then, Morrissey wrote that song ‘We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.’ He denies it now, but he asked us to be there for Its unveiling, because he told us what it was about. But now he says it wasn’t about James. I go, well, why did you ask us to be there for its unveiling, then?

Beyond this tour, Yummy debuted at No. 1 in the U.K. after 17 prior albums, and ‘Laid’ had a big sync in The Bear. I imagine it feels good to be in James at the moment.

We’re playing to the biggest and youngest audiences we’ve ever played to. We’re having more success now than we ever did in the ‘90s, but it’s different because we’re older and because we don’t get played on commercial or mainstream radio. So, it’s kind of undercover, but we’re having the best time. We’re a nine-piece band now. These two amazing women joined us five years ago and they’ve really added a lot and helped to balance us in ways we didn’t know we were unbalanced. We’re very joyful live now. We still have some of that ‘tortured artist’ edge that came from watching Patti or Iggy Pop, but we’re having more fun than we’ve ever had. You know, we’re a fucking weird band. We’ve got trumpet player and we’ve got a guitar player who’s a brilliant violinist. We’ve got another guitar player who’s a brilliant cello player. You don’t form a nine-piece and think you’re going to make a lot of money. It’s never been about that.

We did an incredible gig with an orchestra and choir in Athens and filmed it in the amphitheater at the foot of the Acropolis — the oldest amphitheater in the world. We just edited it and it’s fantastic. Coldplay just went there in the summer, but we did this about a year ago and only just got around to finishing it. That’ll come out next year. We had a No. 1 record and knocked Beyoncé off the top slot, and then Taylor Swift took us off the next week. We’ve always felt we were about longevity and we were always playing the long game. When the Manchester scene came, people tried to equate us with the Smiths and we were like, no, we’re not the Smiths. We’d feel a bit insulted because we were going before them, you know? We felt like scenes only last a few years and we didn’t want to be one of the ones that got swept away. Then, we were linked with the Britpop scene as the godfathers. We’ve always kind of steered our own path to try and avoid being pigeonholed. People are getting us now, but we’re still a tough fish to catch. We change the set every night, but that was more conservative this year than usual because there are some really, really strong, interactive visual aspects to the show we’ve never used before. I want it to be a live experience. Playing a gig in Monday in Washington is totally different than playing on Saturday night in New York. You try to feel what the energy is and make a setlist that responds. It’s about like communication. We feel that that’s being a live band rather than a theater performance, where you just repeat the same shit every night.

Are there things James can do now that they couldn’t do in the ’80s or even the ’90s? What is James now that it wasn’t before? 

In the ‘90s when we got successful, there were the usual addiction issues that came up and it dispersed us and diluted us, I think. Now, we know what we’re doing. We know how good we are. You can put us out in front of any audience and have a blast. It’s just very interesting what’s going on with us. A couple days ago, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman was on a podcast with Steven Bartlett, which is one of my favorites. He said the best live band in the world is James and that we give him a high for two days that he doesn’t come down from. When we were in Athens, Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister who is a socialist philosopher and brilliant man, came to the show. I ended up going off with him on his motorbike the next day.

What music has inspired you lately, even if it’s not necessarily by a young or current artist?

We’re so full of music as musicians and we’ve just finished editing this endless thing from Athens, so I often don’t have time to listen to too much music. But of the stuff I’ve caught recently, IDLES at Glastonbury were stunning. It reminded me so much of that spirit of 1981 and ’82, when all the bands were just doing what the fuck they wanted and creating music for the sake of it, and then some of it would accidentally become successful. It was like seeing Nick Cave in the Birthday Party for the first time or the Pixies in the ‘80s. I thought Black Country New Road’s first few albums were just incredible, especially Ants From Up There. That was one of the strongest records I’ve heard in 30 years. Leonard Cohen, his last album before he died — imagine writing that on your deathbed.

At various times across our history, I’ve been close to R.E.M. or Flea or Bernard Butler. I did an album with Angelo Badalamenti because I loved his work, which was a real blessing. It’s got to move me. We’re old school, so it’s got to sweep you away in some way. I’m not really into commodified pop, but every so often a pop song can cross through and blow you away. The rules can be bent.

Being in a band that tours internationally may sound glamorous to some, but the day-to-day of travel and stress can add up if you don’t have some systems in place to keep yourself sane. What helps keep you grounded?

For me, I get massage and body work. In the mid ‘90s, I ruptured some discs in my neck and was disabled for a couple of years. [bassist] Jimmy [Glennie] turned around to me and went, you have to have your own personal roadie for your equipment. That has really helped me wind down after a gig, so I’m not up until five in the morning, buzzing. I meditate. I try to get out and have stops in nature so I’m not just going city to city. I came to Rio a few days early to take in the mountains and go swimming. We’re also better at supporting each other emotionally and mentally than we were in the ‘90s, but we’re passionate about what we do and we accept that traveling comes with it. You can’t moan about it too much. Sometimes it’s very stressful and other times it’s just a pure joy.

I lost my voice about four weeks ago and it came back just before an important television gig. I struggled for the next two weeks to keep it when we had gigs. Those periods can always be tough, but you come out of it and then suddenly you’re feeling great again. We did two of our biggest gigs when I had COVID this year, including Glastonbury, which I did straight out of bed, and Rock in Rio in Lisbon, which was broadcast live all over Portugal. Those were great gigs, so, go figure. You’re almost more vulnerable when you’re not well, and I think vulnerability on stage is charismatic. I like the artists who walk the edge, not necessarily through psychedelics and drugs. It feels like they’re bringing back something to the culture that other people haven’t articulated yet.

What can you tell us about your new book? 

I have a novel that came out in England and will be out in the U.S. at the same time as the tour. I can maybe do some readings or at least sell it at the gigs. It’s called When I Died for the First Time and it’s about a fucked-up singer coming back from rehab. I have an inherited liver disease. I died of it when I was 21 and was revived in hospital, so I was never able to go down the path of drugs and alcohol. I watched a lot of addiction issues, so this book is almost like, what if I had gone down that route? It’s a dark comedy about the dark side of my world and the music industry. I wrote it over 10 years in between James projects and I’m really proud of it. It went top 10 on the bestseller list in England. It’s sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, and it’s funny and filthy and outrageous and all the things a book should be in that genre.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about yet another Manchester band in the news right now, considering how many tickets Oasis have sold for their reunion shows.

I mean, Noel is on record as saying that he got the idea of forming a band after being a roadie for Inspiral Carpets when they toured with us. Every time I’ve met them, they’ve been very generous and sweet. Then of course you read the stuff in the press and it doesn’t tally with who they are. I wish them luck. I want tickets! I’ll go see them. I only saw them once the first time around. It’s obviously such an archetypal relationship, the brother aspect, that captures another level of imagination and mythic resonance. So many bands wind up hating each other, and it seems such a waste when you’re doing something that you love so much.

I was told this story about watching Simon and Garfunkel bicker about who was too loud in the wedges during a soundcheck for their first reunion performance years ago. These are people who’ve made magic, but they’ve lost perspective. They couldn’t put aside their differences as individuals. Over the years, I’ve met a few bands that really get on, but most really don’t. We’re in this amazing position right now where we really get on, which wasn’t always so in the ‘90s. We had about four or five years that were awful, but that’s a waste. You get to a certain age where you go, enjoy it, because we’re privileged to be making this amazing music that people want to come see and celebrate. As you get older, you give less of a fuck about critics or online trolls. You just do your thing and have a great time, because you know its value.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Tom Morello is back to getting loud. That isn’t exactly a surprise from the Rage Against the Machine guitarist, known as much for his dynamic, noisy riffs as for radical politics. As a solo artist, Morello tended to veer in other directions under his own name. He was a folk singer as the Nightwatchman, a hip-hop collaborator with Street Sweeper Social Club, a troubadour at protests and benefit concerts around the world.

Currently on a tour of festivals and solo gigs across Europe, Morello is halfway into recording a new solo album due out later this year (his previous solo album was released in 2021). Today he shared its first single, the raging “Soldier in the Army of Love.” The track also introduces a new sideman, his guitar-shredding son, Roman, who is just 13. Fans just might catch a glimpse of the younger Morello onstage in July, suggests his proud dad. “The family’s joining me in Italy, and I have a feeling we’re going to get the multi-generational debut somewhere around Turin,” Morello says with a laugh. 

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On the road this summer, he’s pulling out songs from across his three-decade-plus career from Rage to Audioslave, the Nightwatchman, and more. Days ago, he even played a song from his old high school band, Electric Sheep – which also included pal Adam Jones, later of Tool – and another from his pre-Rage band Lock Up.

Speaking over Zoom from backstage at the Live Music Hall in Cologne, Germany, Morello sounds excited about the music in progress. On this tour, he’s playing three outspoken new songs: “Soldier in the Army of Love,” “Union Power” and “They Can’t Kill Us All.” He’s also performing a cover of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” in tribute to his late friend, guitarist, and prison reform activist Wayne Kramer.

Dressed in a red Gang of Four T-shirt, and wearing a cap with “HARLEM” above the brim, Morello leans toward his laptop. “When you’re in a band, it’s chemistry. You merge yourself into a chemistry to get something you can’t create alone,” he says. “With this record, the bossy type-A personality has reasserted itself somewhat. At 60 years old, I wanna make the definitive Tom Morello rock album.”

SPIN: In the past, you’ve always kept your rock music separate from your solo identity. Did something change?

Tom Morello: Each time out, I’ve had a very specific vision of what the album and the tour is going to be. When it was the Nightwatchman stuff, I wanted a very clear break, and it was going to be acoustic, it was going to be folk music. Then with the Atlas Underground stuff, I wanted something that was part illegal Berlin Rave, part art show, part mosh pit of the mind. And this one I’m just embracing 30-plus years of making music and folding it all into one show. And it feels really great to be able to explore the vast wilderness of my 22-album catalog. 

One of the new songs you’re playing now is the album’s first single, “Soldier in the Army of Love.”

We open the show every night with “Soldier in the Army of Love,” and it’s just been destroying. I wrote this song with my son, who wrote the big riffs in it. And to see huge, vast fields of metal heads all going off is richly satisfying and makes me a very proud dad at the same time. 

How long has Roman been playing?

He’s a pandemic guitar player. While the rest of us were baking bread and trying to learn a language, he was putting in four to six hours a day. It’s hard when your father’s a musician – the family business is just something that no one’s interested in. But in the midst of a 10-hour Fortnite session or something – I know that he likes Led Zeppelin – I said, “Would you like to learn the first three notes of ‘Stairway to Heaven’? I promise it won’t take more than a couple of minutes.” And he was willing to give me that much. And the next day we learned the next three notes. And then the third day he asked to continue. 

He has something that I don’t. He has a better ear. So he was able to pick it up on his own. And now I’ve been relegated to being the rhythm guitar player in the family. He’s a young shredding workhorse at the instrument. My family came out with me on the Rage tour in 2022, and that was the first time that he was exposed to that kind of drop-D huge riffage music. After we got home, one day I was walking by his bedroom, and he’s like, “I was working on some riffs. Do you think these riffs go good together?” And I was like, “Those riffs go very good together, son. I think we’re about to write our first song together.” That’s what became “Soldier in the Army of Love.”

What is the song about? 

It’s something about the redemptive power of music: “Transforming motherfuckers like Saul into Paul/On the road to Damascus at the Westfield Mall.” Like, that’s what music does. It did it to me. It can deeply alter not just your worldview, but can shape your soul. Music is something that provides great joy and can be a sledgehammer for social justice. Then a 13-year-old child plays a shredding guitar solo in it, which proves the point. [Laughs]

In the short video clips that you’ve put on social media, Roman’s playing one of your guitars.

Yeah, he’s got the Soul Power guitar and I’ve got my Arm the Homeless guitar. So my guitars keep disappearing into his bedroom. That’s a hazard. 

What does the rest of the new music you’ve been working on sound like?

It’s still shaping up and I have to determine what the final thing will be, but it’s somewhere between like the huge Morellian riffage of Rage and Audioslave and then [Springsteen’s] Darkness on the Edge of Town. Those are kind of the goalposts.

Are you recording your album in an outside studio or at home?

Veritas Studios is the studio at my house where I do all of my stuff. I was over at [producer] Shooter Jennings’s studio Snake Mountain for a few days. In some ways, it’s been sort of a relaxed affair. I got in there with Shooter for a couple of days, and I wrote that song “They Can’t Kill Us All” the day before, and we just worked that up in the studio. It’s very organic. So far I love the results. This really is my first-ever full-length solo rock album. I’ve made a lot of rock albums that have been laced with hip-hop, EDM and folk music. And this one is unapologetically throwing down the rock gauntlet. 

But hip-hop was also an important factor in your voice as a guitar player.

Huge. When I began self-identifying as the DJ in Rage Against the Machine is when the blinders of the guitar-playing tradition fell off. And it felt like an endless horizon of new sonic possibilities on the instrument. 

You recently played with Bruce again in L.A. when he passed through town. How has playing with him affected your music? 

The first time we played together, in 2008, I was at the height of my Nightwatchman acoustic protest music career. I felt that I’d drained the well of my electric guitar riffs and solos, and then along came this 82-bar “The Ghost of Tom Joad” thing that was [Springsteen’s] arrangement. That first night he was just like, “Keep going, keep going, keep going!” And I felt like I was breaking through layer after layer of improvisational discovery. And from that day to this, I realized I don’t have to put down the thing that I do best, which is play electric guitar – in order to play other kinds of music. And on this tour, there are wild guitar solos and a very poignant acoustic set as well. 

You started playing fairly late, right?

17. I had two guitar lessons at 13 that were horrific and made me put down the instrument for four years and it sat gathering dust in the closet. It was a $50 guitar. And my mom would occasionally say, “Why did we blow $50 on that guitar?” I heard that speech for four years. For me, it was punk rock [that changed things]. It was the Sex Pistols cassette … the power of punk compels you into being in a band within 24 hours of hearing that cassette. 

Your high school friend Adam Jones of Tool says you weren’t exactly a genius at first on the instrument.

[Laughs] I was the worst guitar player in our high school by a wide margin.  

Do you also play on the upcoming MC5 record?

We recorded the song maybe a year or so before Wayne passed. It’s a song called “Heavy Lifting.” I talked with Wayne all the time, and he was asking me if I had any spare riffs around. I said, “Wayne, riffs are low-hanging fruit around the Morello residence.” I sent him over five or six and he picked a hot one for “Heavy Lifting.” It’s a great honor to be on what’ll be Wayne’s last record. 

His passing is a big loss.

Huge. He was one of the wisest and best people I’ve ever known – leave musician out of it. I learned so much from him. He was like a mentor and big brother. His spiritual journey from being kind of a feral cat/cad to being someone who literally saved hundreds of people’s lives was just very impressive. It’s a huge loss. But his spirit’s in every room that I play in, and we play “Kick Out The Jams” every show, and it just kickstarts the night in an awesome way in his memory. 

How do you feel about the MC5 finally getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the timing of it? 

Dude, I’m on the committee that helps make the ballot every year. And the MC5 were on that ballot six times and did not get in. So I’m every year standing on the table, throwing a tantrum. But the timing – it’s never too late. The timing is poor, however, as the last two members of the band passed away in the last year, but they are forever enshrined in the hall of greats where they belong. They were in my view the patient zero of punk rock music. And their fearlessness musically and politically remains in a lot of ways kind of unparalleled. 

I will say, over the last 10 years or so, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has really shaped up considerably. They used to exclude metal. There’s still a lot of very deserving bands, but MC5 was on my short list for a long time. 

Speaking of metal, you just recently appeared on a new Def Leppard song, “Just Like 73.” Were they an important band for you?

I remember in 1983 or 84 playing “Rock of Ages” in a Harvard cover band. When they called up with “Do you wanna play a solo?” I was like, Hell yes, I wanna play a solo!

Is your current path as a solo artist open-ended?

First of all, the relationship that I’ve had with the fans through these 30 years is one of the most important relationships in my life. And in a lot of ways – in Rage and Audioslave, and even in some ways the Prophets of Rage – those fans have been underserved. And I love being able to put out a lot of music and to play a lot of music, and to be in the room with them, celebrating a history, but creating a very electric present moment. This European tour has felt very fulfilling in that regard. 

Rage Against the Machine isn’t doing anything right now, but you, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk have repeatedly through the years done different things together. Do you foresee that happening again sometime? 

I don’t know. Right now, I know Timmy’s got a great new band, 7D7D, that he’s psyched about. I couldn’t be happier on the road with the Freedom Fighter Orchestra and making this record. There’s nothing in the cards right now. 

Later this year, you’re being honored with the Woody Guthrie Prize. The Woody Guthrie tradition was clearly an inspiration behind the Nightwatchman.

Very explicitly. He is a North Star to guide one’s point of view in dealing with the music industry, dealing with a readiness to always be available, to stand up for the oppressed, and to lace your music with not just purpose, but humanity. Woody Guthrie’s children’s songs are as beautiful and as impactful as his songs about immigrant rights and his anti-fascist songs. He’s one of the greatest artists of all time. And for them to think of me is a great honor. 

Do you have any thoughts on Julian Assange getting released this week?

What a great victory. A guilty plea – yeah, he was guilty of exposing war crimes. Sorry, not sorry. I’m so glad that he’s free. The chilling point was made that if you do blow the whistle on war crimes at the highest level, they’re coming for you. The fact that he’s free is fantastic. But I think that they made their point – between him and [Edward] Snowden, we’ll do everything we can to ruin your life and set an example. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Fresh off playing table-table tennis on a damp Saturday in Lollapalooza’s backstage area this past July, Perry Farrell is in the mood to gloat. Not about his hard-fought victory over me, but because he can’t wait to share details of the rest of his 2023. “Porno for Pyros is releasing a new EP,” he beams, sitting at an adjacent table drinking a water. 

Plans have changed a bit since that afternoon. The band’s tour, which will be its last, was pushed to 2024, and the still yet-to-be-titled EP was bumped as well. Nonetheless, Farrell’s excitement about the reunited band hasn’t wavered, even as it prepares to call it quits. Again.

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“I couldn’t be happier,” he says. “We’re going into the underground again and we’re going to be performing with DIY artists around the country and we’re going create a scene from blood, sweat, and tears.”

Formed in 1992 following Jane’s Addiction’s dissolution, Porno for Pyros consists of Farrell, guitarist Peter DiStefano, bassist Martyn LeNoble, and drummer Stephen Perkins. Their self-titled debut album was released a year later and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, spawning a minor hit with “Pets.” By the time they finished tracking their follow-up, 1996’s Good God’s Urge, LeNoble had left and was replaced by Mike Watt. Following that album and another new single released on the soundtrack to the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts, Porno for Pyros split in 1998.

Since their unexpected reunion with the Watt-era lineup in 2020 for a Lollapalooza livestream, Farrell and his Pornos bandmates have slowly been getting back into a rhythm of working together. In 2022, the band’s original lineup reunited for its first shows in 25 years. Riding high from the rapturous reception from those first three gigs at the Welcome to Rockville festival and small venues in Los Angeles and Chicago, the band had high hopes for its main stage set at Lollapalooza this summer. 

“The night before we did that show, we thought, this is gonna be amazing,” Farrell recalls. “We’re gonna go out there, and it should be even bigger and greater. We should have our asses kissed all over every last square inch of our butt. Right? Nope, not the case. It was terrible. It was about 105 degrees up there, and young people were not aware of who we were.”

It didn’t deter Farrell, but his bandmates felt compelled to play harder to lure festival attendees to the stage. “I was laughing as I watched a guy playing hacky sack off in a corner (of the field),” Farrell continues. “Some of the guys were emotional about the audience size because we didn’t get the turnout. It’s a very good thing for a musician to get humbled every once in a while. It keeps you honest, and it keeps you focused on why you’re truly doing it.”

As for the planned tour, it was postponed in September to allow Porno for Pyros to complete new songs Farrell says would have been on the band’s third album had it gotten that far back in the day. He admits he wasn’t healthy at the time and, combined with DiStefano’s cancer battle, the timing didn’t work for Porno for Pyros to stay together at that point.

In February, the group started recording at Johnny Depp’s studio in Hollywood and evolved the material’s more cumbersome arrangements into something crisper and more melodic, but with the same bite as earlier Pornos songs. “Agua,” the first track released from the collection, would have been at home on Good God’s Urge, as it is powered by Farrell’s emotive, environment-honoring lyrics and DiStefano’s soaring guitar. “I love that one because one of the things the world needs to work on is the distribution of clean water,” he says. Well, exactly.

“Fingernail,” is a slow-building ballad, of which Farrell says the meaning is that life grows slow … like a fingernail. The EP’s third track, “Little Me,” is a straightforward, bone-rattling, alt-rocker that would have been a logical fit on third Porno for Pyros LP that never was. 

Since the ideas for these songs have been around for so long, Farrell says it was easy for the band to revisit them despite the decades apart. “I loved those songs,” Farrell says, “but the band stalled. Now, starting with those, once you get into the rhythm [of writing], it’s much easier to start writing new things. Those were words and things and thoughts that were left unrealized.”

For now, these three songs are the band’s final recordings, and Farrell says he wanted to give fans something new as Porno for Pyros say goodbye.  

“If you give people three new songs from a classic band, they’re gonna eat it up, and you’re gonna eat it up,” he says.

Even though this is the end for Porno for Pyros, Farrell is optimistic about what the future has in store. “I’m excited about the next few years. We’re going to unify and when that happens, we’re going to throw the best parties the world has seen since Abraham.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The end is near for Candlebox. In August, the veteran Seattle rock outfit released its eighth and final album, The Long Goodbye, and has been on an extended farewell tour since May, with dates scheduled through January 2024.

Frontman and sole original member Kevin Martin could be forgiven for taking his time letting go of Candlebox, which formed in 1993 and quickly found an unexpected place as the kid sibling of the grunge rock family. Three decades on, Martin admits Candlebox lasted far longer than he ever expected.

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“I’ve always been kind of the reluctant lead singer of this band,” Martin shares over Zoom during a day off on tour with 3 Doors Down, further explaining how the pandemic and looming 30th anniversary of the band led to his decision to call it quits. “All of the time I’ve spent with Candlebox has been obviously rewarding and enjoyable and the experience has been amazing, but when COVID hit, being home with my son and my wife was just eye-opening. It was everything I had realized I really wanted and had missed so much of.”

On the call, Martin looks as checked out as he sounds. Sitting alone on the band’s bus, his long hair strewn about his ringer T-shirt and his glasses catching the reflection of his laptop screen, Martin appears weary and apologizes for a slight bronchial cough. “I’m really on autopilot right now,” he admits of the toll inflicted by having been on the road since the end of May. “I haven’t toured like this since I was in my 20s, and I’m 54 now.”

“All of the time I’ve spent with Candlebox has been obviously rewarding and enjoyable and the experience has been amazing, but being home was everything I realized I really wanted and had missed so much of,” adds Martin, who also oversees a foundation, the Riptide Society, to provide mentorship opportunities for young adults and at-risk youth in the foster care system. “I realized I didn’t love music as much as I did when I was younger.”

Candlebox emerged during the heady golden years of the modern rock boom, albeit after fellow Seattle bands Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam had already crossed over into the mainstream. The emotionally gritty, guitar-driven singles “You” and “Far Behind” enjoyed heavy radio play, propelling the band’s self-titled debut to sales of four million copies. It was enough to sustain a career for the better part of the next three decades, minus a hiatus between 2000 and 2006, and now, in contrast to the tragic demises of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley, Candlebox is going out on its own terms.

“If I were to pinpoint what it is that I’d want to be said about us, it’s that ‘they were the happiest accident that Seattle scene had ever seen,’” Martin shares, recalling how none of the original members (guitarist Peter Klett, bassist Bardi Martin, and drummer Scott Mercado) knew each other when Candlebox was formed. “We were this little boy band that got put together by our producer Kelly Gray.”

Being in Seattle was also a bit of happenstance for Martin himself. Born in Elgin, Ill., he moved to San Antonio, Texas when he was 10 and then to Mercer Island, Wa., when he was 14, which he says was a life-altering transition. “When I moved to Seattle, my entire world changed, just from my perspective of what rock ‘n’ roll was,” he says. “It changed everything for me. I just fell in love with being a part of that scene and living in it and getting to know those musicians and becoming friends with them.”

Some of those moments still stand out: Alice in Chains’ Sean Kinney coming into Candlebox’s early rehearsal space looking for drumsticks to borrow, or the late Andrew Wood popping his head into the shoe store where Martin worked to ask him to hang flyers for upcoming Mother Love Bone shows. “There’s a sincerity to what was going on there and that’s what I feel nostalgia for,” he says. “I miss Andy a lot. I really miss Layne singing. I appreciate the groundwork that those bands laid for everybody else.”

Martin now lives in Los Angeles but still keeps in touch with former Seattle scenesters like Sweet Water and Green Apple Quick Step. “I’ll see Jerry [Cantrell] every now and then if he comes to L.A. I see Mike Inez quite a bit,” says Martin, turning somber. “All my friends are gone sadly. My real close friends.”

Scenes like Seattle’s in the ‘90s are also difficult to duplicate, especially at a time when Martin doesn’t “think our country has the wherewithal to focus attention that much,” he says, conceding, “Maybe in the U.K. I think the rock ‘n roll scene in the U.K. right now is really special,” singling out troubadour Sam Fender, indie rockers October Drift, and James and the Cold Gun, which is signed to Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard’s Loosegroove label. Martin has some parting words of his own for up-and-coming bands on The Long Goodbye song “Punks,” warning they won’t be the hot new thing forever.

“Your time is very brief in this industry and if you are not giving it absolutely every ounce of your soul, it will not give it back to you,” says Martin. “It’s the most ruthless business that I’ve ever been in. Be very cautious, pay very close attention, work your asses off, and play as often as you can.”

As for what it might look like when he and current bandmates Adam Kury, Brian Quinn, Island Styles, and BJ Kerwin finally do take their final bow, Martin says, “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll probably walk offstage, take a shower, change my clothes and go to my hotel. I think I probably won’t realize the gravity of it until later in the year or early next year when I’m not doing something. I think that’s when I’ll be like, ‘OK, what do I do with myself now?’”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Back in the uncertain early days of lockdown, Chris Shiflett sat at his Los Angeles-area home wondering what to do. The Foo Fighters guitarist was gearing up for the band to release and tour behind its 10th studio album, Medicine at Midnight, but the pandemic changed that. At home, Shiflett put his energy into his non-Foos endeavors, including recording episodes of his Walking the Floor podcast.

When he wasn’t working on that project or helping his kids get situated with Zoom school, Shiflett, who previously released solo albums in 2017 and 2019, got busy with new material in his home studio. Adapting to the times, Shiflett worked with other songwriters over Zoom and adjusted to the new reality.

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“There were some upsides to it,” Shiflett tells SPIN backstage before the Foos’ recent headlining set at Austin City Limits. “Instead of looking at each other [in person] if you’re stuck, you have your pad and paper, and you’re working to come up with that next line. Unintentionally, it turned into a real productive period.”

Though he didn’t set out to write a new album, the sessions, which took place in August 2020 and saw him work with songwriters like Kendell Marvel, John Osborne of Brothers Osborne, and Cody Jinks, became the foundation for his third solo album, Lost at Sea. When he began to work on it in the spring of 2021, Shiflett planned to utilize multiple producers before realizing the inherent scheduling challenges of such an idea. Ultimately, he enlisted the Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnson to produce the 10-track album, which finds him combining the Americana sounds of Nashville with the dusty sensibilities of California roots rock.

Singles like the mid-tempo rocker “Overboard,” the banjo-powered and reverb-layered “Damage Control,” and the punky “Parties” demonstrate Shiflett’s versatility as a singer and songwriter. “It was the first time ever as an adult that I had time to sit around and navel gaze,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about putting out a record at the time.”

Shiflett realizes that releasing a solo album, even as an artist who has experienced as much success as he has, doesn’t have the pull it once had. That’s why he’d hoped to release the songs individually rather than as a single body of work, but his label, Blue Elán, stepped in and persuaded him to do so. “I think putting out songs is great and playing shows is great,” he says. “But when you put out the record, there’s nothing left to talk about. It’s a bit of a dead art form.”

Even so, Shiflett says the point of him releasing his solo material is simple: to get as many people as possible to hear it. Once that happens, he says, he can focus on what is most important to him: performing live. “Look, I’m old and I grew up with albums and love them,” he says. “And yes, that’s how I want to see it packaged and hear it, but that’s not the world we live in anymore.”

He is aware that his fanbase is comprised of Foos fans and that he has to adjust his expectations of what an audience will be on any given night. “When I was in No Use for a Name, the barometer for a good show and a good crowd was how hard the pit got going,” he says. “Then when I joined Foo Fighters, it was a totally different dynamic musically, and you have to recalibrate for that.” 

Beyond his solo material, when he has some free time from his Foo Fighters commitments, Shiflett is focused on building a second podcast. Titled Shred With Shifty, it also has a video component and has given Shiflett the chance to speak with a number of famous guitarists, including Rush’s Alex Lifeson, Nile Rodgers, and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, who discuss how their signature solos were crafted. 

When Foo Fighters roared back with the release of But Here We Are in May, Shiflett had to find time to juggle his various projects. With the band scheduled to be on the road for the better part of the next year, he knows his time is tight, but is excited to fit everything in. For now, the small victories count, and for him, that means fans actively engaging with his music.

“I saw recently that someone called one of my songs ‘Beach Americana,’” he says. “I’ll take it.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

When SPIN last caught up with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready in the spring of 2021, he showed off a new version of his limited-edition signature Fender Stratocaster, the original of which was the first “big-ticket item” he bought when the band blew up in the early 1990s. For years, McCready mistakenly thought the guitar, for which he thinks he paid $7,000, was a 1959 model (the same one played by his late hero, Stevie Ray Vaughan), but it was actually manufactured a year later.

“It’s got a sound that is almost exactly what my original sounds like,” he enthuses while noodling with the guitar on a couch at Fender’s factory in Corona, Ca.

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The new edition replicates all of the unique nicks of the well-worn surface of the original guitar, which also incurred significant damage when Pearl Jam (minus Eddie Vedder) hit the road with a fellow rock legend in the summer of 1995. “I originally did it on a tour when we were in Neil Young’s backup band and we were in Israel,” he recalls. “I was jamming my guitar neck into the speaker, I think at the end of ‘Down by the River.’  I did it on purpose, trying to take out a speaker, but I missed the speaker and I hit the wood part and it chipped the top of the guitar off. I’m like, ‘Oh, I better not do that anymore with that guitar.'”

McCready chatted with SPIN about the new guitar and the progress Pearl Jam is making on its 12th studio album, which is being produced by Andrew Watt.

Beyond the damage to the top of the guitar, what other moments stand out from the Neil Young tour in 1995?

The thing about Neil was, he was so cool. He was like, ‘OK, what do you guys want to play?’ and I’m like, ‘okay, oh my God, “Down by the River,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”‘ We’re such big fans of so many of his songs, and he was very amenable. I remember playing ‘Cortez the Killer” for like 25 or 30 minutes. We’re in Israel and we’re playing on this old Roman stage and it was very intense. You get sucked into his world. It’s his thing, and you hope to get in his vibe. 

How has it been working with Andrew Watt?

He brings this very positive energy and knows how to get really good sounds. At the same time, his energy kind of kicked us in our asses a little bit. He would be like ‘Come on, dude,’ you know? He is kind of yelling and jumping up and down a lot and being happy. He’s a fan, but he has great structure ideas, great sound ideas, and song ideas. I’m so excited about what he did with us.

In what sense?

The record’s gonna have some great examples of Matt Cameron’s drumming that just blew my mind. He took it up about 10 notches for this new record, and it really is because of Andrew’s enthusiasm, and, again, him jumping up and down and saying ‘Try it again!’ and then saying ‘Oh, we got it!’ and on to the next thing. He pushed us to play as best as we could. It’s hard for us to listen to other people because we have so many ideas ourselves.

What was the last time someone dared to do that?

It’s been a long time. Probably Brendan (O’Brien).

The first or second string of albums with him?

I would say first and second time. I mean, Brendan I love, and we’ve done so many amazing records with him. Andrew is part of this new generation of guys that know exactly what they want to hear. Brendan was that way too. A great producer has an overall vision of what your band can be that maybe you don’t see. Andrew has that in spades. He wants us to sound like the energy of the early days, with music that is of the present. I know I keep saying it, but he kicked our asses in the greatest way possible.

Did you have any material ready to go or did you write in the studio?

We wrote right on the spot.

Have you all ever worked like that before?

I don’t know if that’s ever happened. We’ll always get together before [the studio] and work on demos with our friends. Richard Stuverud will do stuff with Jeff. I’ll use Mike Musburger. Then we’ll bring them into the main band and get feedback: ‘I like this’ or ‘I’m not responding to this.’ But we always come in with way too much stuff, which is a good problem to have. This time, we brought nothing in. It was intriguing, but a bit scary.

Were you anxious about changing up the way you’ve been doing this for so many years?

There was a little bit of anxiety but also, I feel like we’re at a point in our career where we can take chances and not do the same thing. I think we have a mindset of being open to that. Andrew told us not to bring any of our stuff, except for Matt’s drums. Andrew, or Brendan for that matter, knows exactly what each amp sounds like and what they’re gonna do. I don’t know that until I’m doing it. I just know what I like to hear.

Maybe you will have to get him one of these new signature guitars.

I gave Andrew one of the [2021 replica models], and he loves it. I guess back in the day, in terms of being a guitar player, he was a big fan of mine.

You’re saying that in an incredulous tone of voice.

A bit. I can tell you this funny story. We were playing in New York [at Irving Plaza], which must have been more than 15 years ago when Andrew was 15 years old. As I was leaving after the show, there was this guy and his kid waiting to talk to somebody in the band. He says, ‘My son Andrew here really wants to play music. But I want him to go to college.’  I said, ‘Well, the music business is really hard, right?’ and I turned into my dad in that moment [Laughs]. ‘It’s very hard. You’ve got to have something to fall back on. I think you should go to college but you should also play music and have fun with it.’ We joke about that now, because he didn’t go to college and now is this multi-million-dollar producer, despite me giving him bad advice!

Not bad advice. Safe advice.

Yes, exactly. He didn’t listen to it and he’s become this huge producer. I never knew that story until we started working with him. He was a fan and is a fan of the band, so that has helped with making this record.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Malfunkshun/Mother Love Bone‘s Andrew Wood and Brad/Satchel’s Shawn Smith were two of the greatest vocalists ever to emerge from the Seattle music scene, and Stone Gossard and Regan Hagar just happened to be in bands with both of them. Wood died of a drug overdose at 24 in 1990, just as Mother Love Bone was about to release its major-label debut, and Smith died in 2019 at age 53 from a torn aorta – but Gossard and Hagar are helping ensure their work, and legacy, will not soon be forgotten.

The lifelong friends co-founded Brad with Smith in 1992 and then Seattle-based Loosegroove Records label two years later at the zenith of Gossard’s success in Pearl Jam. With assistance from Brad guitarist Keith Lowe and engineer Floyd Reitsma, they’ve spent the past couple of years completing the final Brad album, In the Moment That You’re Born (July 28, Loosegroove), featuring vocals Smith recorded before his death. An outlier amid the band’s more genial, uptempo sound, it includes some of the darkest and heaviest music in the Brad discography, but there’s also an uplifting nod to its members’ storied Seattle music lineages thanks to a cover of Malfunkshun’s “Stars N’ You.”

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Active from 1980 (when Wood and Hagar were still teenagers) until 1988 (when Wood left to join Gossard and future Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament in Mother Love Bone), Malfunkshun originally recorded the track for Sub Pop’s classic 1986 Deep Six compilation and always considered it a career highlight. Hagar tells SPIN that Smith was himself a huge fan of Wood’s artistry, which helped him overcome initial qualms about its inclusion on In the Moment That You’re Born.

“‘Stars N’ You’ was a Stone idea to get us to show up at the studio together, which wasn’t always easy,” Hagar concedes. “I think it was a bit of a ploy. Shawn loved Andy Wood so much, so if we say we’re going to cover Malfunkshun, he’ll show up, and maybe we can jumpstart the Brad process. Shawn sounded so much like Andy with his inflections. He channeled him for that track. In a way, we ended up really needing that song. It fit the record and it made sense in the end, even though I was against putting it on because of the entanglements I personally felt about it. I’m so happy it’s there now. Isn’t it crazy how we go through these different lives and different viewpoints, and how something can be so important now but not important later?”

The experience reminded Hagar of his first encounter with Smith in 1988 when they worked the cash register at Seattle’s Tower Records and nerded out over Prince’s then-new album Lovesexy. Smith had been born four hours east in Spokane and raised in Bakersfield, Ca., but in his early 20s, he settled in Seattle at a particularly fertile time for the local music scene, a couple of years before grunge would change everything forever.

“In the basement, you’d re-shrinkwrap the records you played during your shift and count your till and stuff. It would take a good half-hour. We were down there together one evening, and I played him some Malfunkshun I’d just recorded with Andy,” Hagar recalls. “Shawn was super into it and really complimentary. The next day, we’re in the same situation, and he’s like, I brought my tape. He had a thing called Bag O’ Nasty, which was him and a four-track. It was all super funky and soulful. I freaked out! I said, ‘We’re going to start a band. Let me put some players together.'”

The pair first teamed in the funk band Molasses and then in the more rock-driven Bliss, which eventually morphed into Satchel. Hagar had immediately gushed to Gossard about Smith’s talents, and it wasn’t long before he got the itch to join in the fun. “Pearl Jam had finally sold some records, and I was back in Seattle lurking around,” Gossard tells SPIN. “Regan, Shawn, and I kinda jammed together one day at their warehouse, and from that moment on, it was like, let’s make a record. Bliss was going, but I thought, let’s do something else too.”

Augmented by California bassist Jeremy Toback, whom Gossard had never heard play and Hagar had never even met, the musicians rolled tape at Seattle’s Avast Studios in the fall of 1992 and came up with an album’s worth of material far removed from the prevailing, often gloomy Pacific Northwest sound of the time. At the center was Smith’s preternaturally soulful voice, which one reviewer described as a “honeyed falsetto” akin to “the song of another species altogether.”

“That’s the state of mind we were in: anything can happen at any time,” Gossard says of the sessions that birthed Shame, released in late April 1993 by Pearl Jam’s then-label Epic Records. “You just meet a guy in a record store and then you call a guy from California you’ve never played music with, and something great’s going to happen. We were manifesting at that point at a high level. At the time, there was really a premium on people coming from different perspectives. Everything we were doing was like, it’s punk rock but it’s got this other thing. Trying to tie soul music into that seemed totally reasonable, exciting, and absolutely in the range. Everything had an eclectic quality to it because there were no rules at that point.”

“The music at the time was dominated by Prince and Michael Jackson, and that was the backdrop of us thrashing around and saying, we’re going to mix punk and blues and Prince and we’re going to be funky,” Hagar says. “Looking back on it now, that attitude was kind of adorable.”

At first, a reluctant frontman who would hide behind a keyboard, Smith quickly grew in confidence both onstage and off. “Shawn had the skill we all dream about – it’s not being able to shred necessarily, but it’s feeling the music and finding that thing that makes the sound sink deeper into whatever it is,” Gossard observes. “I don’t think Shawn ever touched a guitar before he was in Seattle, but we watched him grow with it,” Hagar says. “His sonic sweeps on guitar have a big quality. The title track of the new album is very much that sound, which, to me, is him picking up a guitar and treating it like a piano. He had a couple pedals to make it even bigger. That became a signature you can really identify as him and not Stone. He’s creating a bed of sound, whereas Stone can be more specific and clear with a guitar.”

Between Gossard’s Pearl Jam commitments and Hagar’s eventual work on the road with Neil Young, Brad released four more albums and an outtakes compilation over the next 20 years and toured as much as time permitted. All the while, Smith would “float around jam rooms in Seattle and play with a lot of different scenes,” says Hagar. “People still are surfacing and going, hey, I’ve got a recording from when Shawn came by our place and did this or that on a track. He went around putting great, groovy stuff on people’s music.”

Work began at leisurely pace on a new Brad album in 2014, with the musicians spending a few days at a time at Gossard’s Studio Litho over the next five years. The core group of songs included what became the swirling, moody title track, and hard-charging rockers such as “Pieces of Sky in My Hand” and “Hey Now What’s the Problem?” Smith’s vocals are often in a much lower register than usual, adding a haunting quality to the material. “In the time since our prior album in 2012, Shawn had discovered something in terms of layering his voice, and it’s where that lower timbre was born,” Hagar says. “It’s really a tribute to Shawn’s singing that he found different vibrations and didn’t just go back to that same place that gave him success,” Gossard adds.

In the Moment That You’re Born also showcases Smith’s more tender side on the beautifully sung piano ballads “Meadow in Autumn” and “Take Me Back Home,” while “I’m Digging U” features saxophone accompaniment from Hans Teuber to add color to a vocal take Smith was planning to re-sing but never got the chance to. “We were really close to finishing the album before Shawn died,” Hagar says. “We had planned to put bells and whistles on at the end, but all the main structural stuff was already there.”

By 2022, Gossard, Hagar, and Lowe felt ready to revisit the material and prepare it for release, a process aided by “filtering everything through our first year when we were Brad,” per Gossard. “Where were we at our best, and why? We marveled at Shawn’s vocals and our bittersweet love for each other. We were sharing it with our good friend Hans, who is a beautiful piano and horn player and helped us a lot with this process. It really was an enjoyable process, even though we didn’t know if everything would come together and sound like a record. It took until the end for that to happen, and for us to see how it all fit.”

“Mostly, it was a feeling of reminiscing and trying to be in that place of discovery — a state of mind we should have tried to be in as much as we could have been through our career, but struggled to do at different times,” he continues. “We cherished it, and looked at it as a beautiful opportunity. We’re so thankful we had music to finish. Any day, any one of us could be gone, you know? I think we wanted to really pay tribute to Shawn and thank him for being who he was. All his unique and eclectic qualities made us so happy and inspired us. It also sometimes made us mad and challenged us, but it was a joy. We made this album with a lot of heart, and with the essence of Brad.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The summer of 2019 should’ve been the start of an exciting new chapter for drummer Janet Weiss. That July, citing creative differences, she left Sleater-Kinney, the three-piece indie act she’d played with since 1996. Her attention then shifted to tour prep with Quasi, her duo with songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and ex-husband Sam Coomes.

That’s when tragedy struck.

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Weiss was hit in a devastating car accident that broke both her legs, shattered her collarbone, and left her temporarily confined to a wheelchair.

“It was really shaky for a lot longer than I thought it would be,” Weiss tells SPIN over Zoom from her Portland home. “The doctor made it sound like in four weeks you’re gonna feel great. It took like two years to feel semi-normal.”

Weiss was surrounded by her partner, friends, and family to help kickstart the arduous healing process. Her sister, Julie, launched a GoFundMe for physical therapy, nursing care, and other expenses. Facing an uncertain future, Janet gradually found the strength to wheel herself over to a little electronic drum kit and began making music again with Coomes.

“When I started feeling better, we started practicing,” she says. “We really started practicing heavily, like every day, and that’s what I think accelerated my recovery and my ability to get back to drumming.”

Coomes brought new ideas to Weiss. As her health improved, a fresh batch of songs began to take shape, featuring the band’s trademark sonic sophistication and savage social commentary. The results are documented on Breaking the Balls of History. It’s their 10th album and their first since 2013’s Mole City. It was produced by John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Death Cab for Cutie) at Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, Wash. in a fast, five-day session, purposefully designed to attempt to capture the live performance environment in which the songs were written.

Breaking the Balls of History is full of catchy yet compositionally adventurous tracks that underline the pair’s unique musical connection. The lead single, “Queen of Ears,” starts off with a series of synth bursts from Coomes’s keyboard rig, an instrument of his own design called the Rocksichord, accompanied by Weiss’s pounding rhythm, then swells with shared vocals into unexpected harmony.

Weiss and Coomes have been linchpins in the Pacific Northwest music community since the 1980s. Weiss was a fan of Coomes’s wry, erudite San Francisco-based folk rock band, The Donner Party. They met, married, and started making music together. While the marriage only lasted four years, their friendship and creative collaboration has endured for decades. Along the way they’ve each made significant contributions to indie rock, working with dozens of other musical partners. Weiss has drummed with Stephen Malkmus, Bright Eyes, and The Shins. Coomes played with Elliott Smith, Built to Spill, and, most recently, Jon Spencer. But they’ve always returned to Quasi.

When the pandemic took hold, they kicked into high gear, playing together every day, trying to make art out of an increasingly chaotic world. First came a charity single, “Last Days of the Thin Blue Line Lie,” which was directly inspired by the Portland-area protests following the murder of George Floyd, with proceeds going to the nonprofit organization Don’t Shoot Portland. It was recorded in masks in their rehearsal space.

“We felt the moment demanded that we try and do something. And that was what we did,” Coomes laughs. “It wasn’t because it was, in any way, an ideal time for us personally.”

Then came an onslaught of blistering tunes like the thundering, defiant album opener “Last Long Laugh.” There’s “Back in Your Tree,” a scathing indictment of the recent billionaire space race and “Gravity,” a kind of companion song which warns “you might believe the pigs can fly / that’s the kind of lie you just might buy” but “gravity don’t care at all.” The most topical track is “Doomscrollers,” an ode to “everyone sleeping in their car / and all the teenage TikTok stars / and everybody baking bread / doomscrolling, going outta their head.”

Breaking the Balls of History manages to recall all eras of the band’s output, from early achievements like 1998’s Featuring “Birds” to mid-period milestones like 2006’s When the Going Gets Dark. It also maintains that same raw and immediate energy that’s always been their hallmark. It’s the sound of two friends, living one day at a time, hammering their emotions into songs.

“It’s all about the human. It’s all about making that transhuman connection,” says Coomes. “A piece of music isn’t really just chords and sounds and words. It’s about intangible things.”

It’s those intangibles, a special alchemy, that has made Quasi into a 30-year institution. Now they’re embarking on an ambitious headlining tour to share these new songs with the world. And both Weiss and Coomes seem thankful to be healthy, razor-sharp, and ready for the task at hand.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Heavenly, the UK indie pop group that defined the look and sound of the subgenre known as twee, can settle quickly into the kind of irrepressible repartee that comes easily to people who have been in each other’s lives for the better part of three decades. Almost instantly, the quartet’s easygoing banter on a recent Zoom call becomes spotted with gentle chiding, inside jokes and shared memories about the band’s formation in the late ’80s.

“I was humming along to something in the kitchen of the flat that we lived in, in Brixton,” singer/keyboardist Cathy Rogers remembers. “I can’t even remember if it was as direct as [singer/guitarist Amelia Fletcher] saying ‘Be in the band’ or more like ‘It would be nice to have some humming or some la-la-las.’”

“Do you remember what you were cooking?” bassist Rob Pursey asks. “We were obsessed at the time with this little book written by an Indian housewife, which told you how to crack the curry secret. We were on the verge of discovering it and then Amelia started talking about bands.”

The four Brits, rounded out by guitarist Peter Momtchiloff, have been spending a lot of time mulling over their collective past. Not only in search of fodder for the liner notes in an ongoing series of reissues of Heavenly’s four studio albums (Heavenly vs. Satan was released in November through Fletcher and Pursey’s label, Skep Wax), but also as the group looks to play their first concerts in 26 years in May.

News of the group’s reunion, if only for a pair of gigs, has sent the global network of indie pop fans buzzing since it was announced in September. But the excitement has been tempered a touch due to the absence of founding drummer, and Amelia’s younger brother, Matthew Fletcher. His death by suicide at age 25 was the reason for Heavenly’s dissolution in 1996, soon after the release of their final album, Operation Heavenly.

“I think we all thought we wouldn’t do any music ever again after he died,” Amelia says. “He was so intrinsic to Heavenly. He was my brother. He was our friend. We thought ‘We had a good run. We don’t need to do this anymore.’”

The sadness of Matthew’s death and Heavenly’s subsequent split was even harder to accept considering how the band seemed poised for a huge breakthrough with Operation Heavenly, an album that added big Britpop guitars to their frothy sound. The album truly felt like the culmination of the rapid ascent the quintet had enjoyed since the release of their first singles in 1990.

At that time, the members of Heavenly, save Rogers, were still dusting off the ashes of their former project, Talulah Gosh — a spikier, but no less tuneful, ensemble beloved of influential BBC DJ John Peel. Amelia determined that “No one really wanted to hear indie music” and instead tried her hand at cutting a dance single. “Only I was uniquely bad at making dance music,” she laughs. The other members of Talulah Gosh — Matthew Fletcher, Momtchiloff, and Pursey — decided to start a new group together. “They started doing gigs,” Amelia says, “and I was jealous and I wanted a band too! Hence, Heavenly was born.”

For all the jangle and sugar sweet elements of the band’s undeniably catchy music, there was a caustic quality to Heavenly. Their name was chosen in hopes of irritating the misogynistic U.K. music press of the time. “The main criterion was that it would be one of those sort of effeminate words that journalists would almost struggle to even say,” Pursey says.

Though Heavenly and their pop compatriots had their champions in major British news rags, the group was too often dismissed by primarily male writers. “It’s still the same feeble, determinedly underachieving twittery that made the Gosh such a fine argument for the reintroduction of conscription,” one critic said of an early gig. Such comments only strengthened the band’s resolve to continue, finding strength in numbers among the artists also signed to revered indie label Sarah Records and their fans across the Atlantic, like Candace Pedersen, who helped release their albums through K Records.

Through the latter imprint, the members of Heavenly also made deep connections with the riot grrl scene, which inspired Amelia to write material that moved beyond the starry-eyed love songs and cable knit breakup laments found on Heavenly vs. Satan and 1992’s Le Jardin de Heavenly. In came a more jagged, jaded edge as well as boldly pro-choice anthems like “Sperm Meets Egg, So What?” from the band’s third album The Decline and Fall of Heavenly and the daring “Hearts and Crosses.” Released first on a 7” single in 1993, the song features the skipping rhythm and ‘60s keyboard chime of pure pop, but the lyrics track the fate of a young woman whose giddy love affair turns into sexual assault.

By the time the band looked to make what would be its final album, Britpop became a phenomenon. As music fans and record collectors, Heavenly couldn’t help but be influenced by it. Brash guitars and big choruses found their way into Operation Heavenly, a record that by all rights should have been carried along by the wave generated by Blur and Oasis. Heavenly never got the chance.

“My brother died just before that album came out,” Amelia says. “So we might have benefited from it, but we never did.”

For a year, the surviving members didn’t see much point in making music, but they began to feel the itch again. Eventually, they reconvened with a new drummer and new material, recording and performing as Marine Research. But by the start of the new millennium, other pursuits started pulling them away from being full-time musicians.

Since then, Fletcher and Pursey have cycled through groups like Tender Trap, Sportique and their current pursuits in the Catenary Wires and Swansea Sound. Momtchiloff makes music with his partner Jessica Griffin’s long-standing project, the Would-Be-Goods. Only Rogers seemed to have left music behind. (“I’m slightly shocked that you haven’t heard about my time in an Italian rural choir,” Rogers quips.)

The four have remained close in the ensuing years, but getting the band back together always seemed unlikely due to the absence of Matthew. “It would have been really hard, if we had tried to, for anybody else to sit in that place,” Pursey says. “But we’re lucky because [Ian Button from the Catenary Wires] is the first drummer I met and played with where I thought, ‘Actually, this could work.’ There’s something about his personality that makes it okay.”

Another element that made a reunion probable is the members of Heavenly knowing that it’s likely a short-lived affair. That (and a successful first rehearsal) helped remove a lot of the pressure that might otherwise have bogged them down and ended things again.

“I think it’s probably a bit like going back to your family home when you’re an adult,” Rogers says. “As soon as you go back there, you’re just back there. Playing again felt like it always did, and it was really nice.”

“You might, for a while, get a bit up yourself and think, ‘Oh this is surely a bit undignified to, in middle age, start doing what you did in your youth,’” Momtchiloff says. “Then you realize you don’t have much dignity anyway, so you haven’t got much to lose.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.