An Offspring album in 2024? Yep, and the California punk legends sound plugged back in on their 11th outing.
Time was, The Offspring appeared to have run out of steam. The surprisingly sharp, humour-wrapped lyrics and often cartoony slant on SoCal punk that sat at the heart of their best works – 1994’s Smash, Americana from ’98 – increasingly kept losing ground to their more silly impulses. Let The Bad Times Roll from 2021, their first album in almost a decade, occasionally pointed to a righting of things, but there was no need for a punked-up run through of Hall Of The Mountain King, nor the ridiculous and terrible Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) that preceded the record.
At first, Supercharged looks to be more of the same. Opener Looking Out For 1 is a microwaved Original Prankster without the wit (partly down to its lyrics about greed, mostly because it’s so low-powered). But this is putting their worst foot forward, rather than a sign of things to come. From there on, as the speedy, sub-three-minute banger Light It Up bounces in, The Offspring are on appropriately energised, refreshed form.
True, it’s also an often familiar-sounding form – that same chord progression at varying speeds, faster than Bad Religion, slower than NOFX – but they also sound like themselves again. Come To Brazil manages to balance gung-ho forward thrust, a Def Leppard-ish ambition, and humour that actually lands, The Fall Guy is a classic bit of Dexter Holland storytelling that sounds like The Kids Aren’t Alright, and Make It All Right is a pop-punk banger that's made of golden summers.
In there, there’s still the nuggets of Dexter’s questions about the world around him. Most notably, the speedy Truth In Fiction shows an anxiety on misinformation with its talk of ‘Manipulated pixels… confirming all my fears’, showing that while the music is nothing new, the man at least continues to have something worth saying when he wants to.
If nothing else, Supercharged finds The Offspring doing The Offspring very well again. And, really, they’ve tried breaking the mould enough over the years to be allowed to repeat themselves. So long into the game, it’s a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.
Verdict: 3/5
For fans of: Green Day, Bad Religion, Neck Deep
Supercharged is released on October 11 via Concord
