TEENAGE BOTTLEROCKET – SICK SESH!

Ray Carlisle – vocals/guitar // Kody Templeman – vocals/guitar

Miguel Chen – bass/vocals // Darren Chewka – drums/vocals

 They’ve toured the world countless times. They kept the leather jacket-and-Converse look alive through an increasingly neon landscape. They’ve written songs about KISS, Top Gun and Minecraft. Hell, they’ve even been on CNN a few times! Please welcome back to the spotlight Wyoming’s own Teenage Bottlerocket, whose ninth album, the 12-track Sick Sesh! — traffic-cone-orange cover art and all — will be released 08/27/2021 on Fat Wreck Chords.

            “This record is 12 songs because 14 was too long,” cracks vocalist/guitarist Ray Carlisle. “We wanna keep the energy up.”

            Recorded in November 2020 at the Blasting Room (the band’s eighth straight full-length with producer Andrew Berlin), Sick Sesh! is a little bit rougher around the edges than the last few TBR albums, from the haunting “Statistic” to the panic-inducing “Strung Out On Stress” to the buzzsaw lead of “Semi Truck.” According to Carlisle, that was on purpose.

            “We spent a lot of time on guitar tones this time around — that was important for us,” he says. ““We made sure to bring the noisy, loud, irritate your fuckin’ mom guitar back. There’s a ton of intentional guitar noise and feedback. We dug up the amps we used for Freak Out! and They Came From The Shadows. This is punk rock, after all. Stay Rad! Is a great record, but it’s very radio friendly. I wanted to do the opposite of that: Let’s get fuckin’ noisy.”

While the bulk of Sick Sesh! was written in January 2020 (with “Statistic” actually co-written between Carlisle and his son Milo), the COVID pandemic allowed for the band to take a little extra time for fine tuning, and the resulting tracks are some of the most stylistically diverse on the record. First up, there’s the Templeman-penned “Strung Out On Stress,” the fastest, angriest track on Sick Sesh!, all about losing your mind during the pandemic. On the flipside, there’s the mid-tempo, melodic track “The Squirrel,” written by bassist Miguel Chen and sung by Templeman, that’s literally about a cute little rodent.

“He had too much time on his hands during the pandemic,” Carlisle jokes. “How did it become a Teenage Bottlerocket song? I’m not sure. But it has the best guitar lead we’ve ever written!”

Chen also wrote the infectious sing-along “Ghost Story” as well as the album-closing “Moving On,” which marks the first time Carlisle has ever sung Chen’s lyrics on a Teenage Bottlerocket album. The song, about the bassist’s decision to move from his hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, to Texas to be with his ailing father, demonstrates a new side of Teenage Bottlerocket that’s reflective, wistful and dare we say a little mature. (“It felt good to sing that one,” says Carlisle.)

With more than 100 original songs already in their catalog, how does the band stay motivated when they’re eight records deep?

“We’re always in competition with ourselves,” Carlisle explains. “The real competition is between me and Kody. It’s like, ‘You wrote a song that destroys everything else on this record. Let me try to do that to you real quick. How’s that feel?” And then he comes back and one ups me.

“It’s all about the songs,” he continues. “The songs carry this record all the way. That’s not to say there are bad songs on our other records — we have a hard time releasing a shitty song. But these songs are especially great. You know ALL’s best-of record where Allroy is dissecting a musical note? I felt we kind of tapped into that record in a great way, not in a ‘Oh no, they’re experimental now!’ way. This is a Teenage Bottlerocket record through and through, but there’s a lot of hidden elements.”

Carlisle’s pride about Sick Sesh! is obvious, but he’s not the only one who loves the album.

“Fat Mike called me and said, ‘Hey, this is your best record,” Carlisle recalls. “I said, ‘Cool, thanks for noticing.’”

With Sick Sesh! ready to drop, Teenage Bottlerocket will return to the road once more throughout 2021 and beyond, and you can expect to hear plenty of new tracks peppered into their already high-energy sets. Given that the band is already two decades old, however, is there any chance of the band slowing down? Carlisle shoots that idea down right away.

“I want to have the best next 10 years,” the singer says. “We’ve grinded the grind. Now we get to actually enjoy being a band, and not think too much about different ways to try and ‘make it.’ We’re riding this wave we built ourselves. I wanna surf it for another 10 years.”

Well there you have it: The three things in life can always count on are death, taxes and Teenage Bottlerocket. But before Carlisle signs off, he has a question for all the fans out there,

“What’s your favorite Teenage Bottlerocket song?” he asks. “Bzzt! Wrong answer. It’s on this record, you just haven’t heard it yet.”

The Copyrights play a stripped-down version of pop-punk in the tradition of fellow Illinois bands like and , with old-school punk and pop influences ranging from and to Sound Affects-vintage and the first couple of albums. Formed in the small southern Illinois city of Carbondale (much closer to St. Louis, MO, than Chicago) in 2002, the Copyrights originally consisted of bassist and primary lead singer Adam Fletcher, guitarists/vocalists and Ken Clifford, and drummer Luke McNeill. Signed to the Washington, D.C., indie Insubordination Records, the Copyrights released their debut album, We Didn’t Come Here to Die (produced by Illinois pop-punk legend Mass Giorgini), in 2003. It was subsequently followed by two EPs, 2004’s Button Smasher and 2005’s Nowhere Near Chicago (both through It’s Alive Records). Replacing the departed Clifford with new guitarist Nick O’Neil, the Copyrights returned with their second album, Mutiny Pop, in May 2006. Not wasting any time, various shows followed before the guys (now with Jeff Funburg on board in place of O’Neil) were back in the studio by the start of 2007 to commence recording their next album; Make Sound surfaced that spring via Red Scare. ~ Stewart Mason, Rovi

A good band name always gives the potential listener some idea what sort of music to expect. (Bad band names are ones that mess with those expectations: a certain artsy-jangly guitar pop band of the early ’90s would have been much more successful had they not been called , which sounds like the name of a scabrous hardcore act.) Chicago-based pop-punk band the Methadones is an excellent case in point: methadone — not to be confused with methamphetamine, aka crystal meth — being the drug prescribed to recovering heroin addicts who are attempting to get clean through a rehab-type regimen, the listener immediately expects world-weary, sadder but wiser punk rock, perhaps with a rootsy edge, not unlike the best of  or . The Methadones deliver in full on that promise, but also add a bubblegummy power pop side to their music that makes them equally attractive to fans of the post- cadres of mall punk bands.