Californian pop punks The Offspring, have released a taste of their forthcoming 9th studio album and it’s left commentators and fans speechless. But not because of how good it is, rather because of how bad it is.
Sure, when you’ve got a back catalogue of songs that includes ‘Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)’, ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’, and ‘Original Prankster’, nobody is expecting a masterpiece, but the new single is so bad some are calling it a deliberate ‘troll’ by the band.
The over-the-top corny single, ‘Cruising California (Bumpin’ In My Trunk)’, carries on a long held tradition of The Offspring mocking pop and culture, but the song jumps the shark from mocking pop to becoming a mockery itself.
Jam packed full of pop culture references such as the Ramone’s famous call to action ‘hey ho, let’s go’, and a Ke$ha sound-alike, the song quickly descends into a total mess and leaves us wondering if the band are possibly past their use-by dates.
But does that matter? They’ve enjoyed a hugely successful career spanning nearly 20 years and sold over 36 million albums worldwide – an enviable legacy.
Still, to see a band go from ‘pretty fly’ to a pathetic joke is disheartening.
The song is the first preview of Days Go By, their first album since 2008’s Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace.
Speaking to US radio station KROQ about the new album, frontman Dexter Holland revealed it’s been a work in progress. “We’ve been working on this record for a couple of years,” he said.
“It’s gone through stages where we’ll play it for a while and say, you know that could be a little bit better… Usually people don’t know about that as we revise songs but now with the Internet it’s different,” he continued.
“We were just in Japan and we were gonna debut a new song off the record and we knew that as soon as we played it in Japan it would be on YouTube… We’re basically playing it for the whole world.”
The album’s due to drop on 26th June, but if this song is any indication of the rest of the album, we think we’ll probably give it a miss.
Listen to ‘Cruising California (Bumpin’ In My Trunk)’ below, if you dare.
