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. 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. “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. This is punk rock, after all.” “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. Well there you have it: The three things in life can always count on are death, taxes and Teenage Bottlerocket.

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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.