Teenage Bottlerocket

About

Photo by: Jason Pendleton 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! So 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 August 27th 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 flip side, there’s the mid-tempo, melodic track “The Squirrel,” written by bassist Miguel Chen and sung by Templeman, that’s liter