It’s been a rather eventful year for punk legends NOFX, but it seems that the band have decided to put it all behind them and hit the studio once again.
At the start of this year, NOFX were effectively the same as they always had been. With an Aussie tour in February for the inaugural edition of Download Festival, the band even released a brand new song in honour of late physicist Stephen Hawking. Basically, they were kicking off their 35th year of being a band in the usual fashion.
However, when the band hit the stage back in May, that’s when things began to go south. While performing in Las Vegas, the band made a joke that referenced the infamous 2017 shooting that occurred in the city.
“We played a song about Muslims and we didn’t get shot. Hooray” said Fat Mike, to which his bandmate Eric Melvin responded, “I guess you only get shot in Vegas if you are in a country band.”
Fat Mike finished the joke with “at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans,” eliciting a mixed response from the crowd.
Following this controversy, the band issued a full apology for making comments on the shooting, before they took to social media to reveal how they had been “effectively banned” from playing shows in the US in light of the controversy.
Now, it appears the group are back to their old tricks, and have hit the studio to make new music.
Taking to Instagram yesterday, frontman Fat Mike shared a snippet of a new song that he had just finished writing at San Francisco’s Motor Studios. “Didn’t have a lot of shows this year, so I wrote 55 NOFX songs,” he began. “I just wrote number 56 tonite.”
As it stands, it’s been two years since the group released First Ditch Effort, their first record in four years, which in turn was the longest gap between albums for the band. While NOFX did release a live album, Ribbed – Live In A Dive, back in August, history tells us we’re on track for a new release from them soon.
Of course, considering all that’s gone on over the past few months, we’d wager that the band might now have themselves quite a bit to say in their music. With how outspoken and unapologetic they’ve been in the past, we’d be willing to bet that album number 14 might just be one of their best yet.
Check out NOFX’s ‘I Don’t Like Me Anymore’:
