NOFX, one of the pioneers of SoCal punk, have started the new year by paying tribute to all the bands who pay tribute to them.
They have just released Linewleum as the first single from their forthcoming 14th full-length studio record, Single Album.
It’s inspired by the fact that so many bands have covered the song Linoleum, from their classic 1994 album Punk In Drublic.
Frontman Fat Mike said: “I have no idea why Linoleum is THE NOFX song that is covered by so many bands, while other NOFX songs get hardly any attention.
“Linoleum wasn’t a single; it had no video; it got no radio play, and most importantly, it didn’t even have a chorus!
“So, one night I stayed up till 4am checking out all the different versions on YouTube. Watching hundreds of bands from over 28 countries (mostly Indonesia) doing Linoleum was a humbling experience for me.
“So I decided to write a song that was a shout-out to all those people that learned those four chords and remembered the non-rhyming lyrics.
“Then I asked the biggest of all the bands (Avenged Sevenfold) to play some leads on the song. Then M Shadows suggested we do a video together. Then I figured I should put all of the bands in the video. Well, I couldn’t fit all the bands, but I picked a bunch of cool ones!
“A song about not playing a song that’s not a hit song with a video about other bands covering the song! This is why I love punk rock and writing punk songs. Rules out the door!”
Formed in Los Angeles in 1983, NOFX have sold more than eight million records, while inspiring countless other bands, and Fat Mike’s Fat Wreck Chords is one of punk’s most successful independent labels.
Single Album will be released on Fat Wreck on February 26, and it is, as singer and bassist Mike concedes, “a dark album”.
That wasn’t the original intent. By early 2020, NOFX — rounded out by guitarist El Hefe, guitarist Eric Melvin, and drummer Erik Sandin — had written and recorded enough songs for a double album which they planned to release that autumn. But like so much about 2020, those plans changed.
“When you write a double album, you write differently,” Mike says. “I was writing really different songs, and some fun songs, but you have to make a double album interesting enough to listen to the whole way. I wanted to make a perfect double album, and I didn’t accomplish that. So I decided to just make a single album, hence the title.”
Recorded at Motor Studios in San Francisco with Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore (Rise Against, Alkaline Trio, Teenage Bottlerocket), Single Album pares down the 23 songs NOFX tracked to just 10. “I just kept adding songs,” Mike says. “I was maybe a little out of my mind. I was pretty high on drugs that year.”
After being hospitalised with a bleeding ulcer — a terrifying experience that caused him to vomit blood — Mike entered rehab in the autumn of 2020. He promptly wrote another new album while there, and has been sober since.
Single Album represents his most personal work to date, and pre-orders are being taken now HERE for vinyl, CD and digital versions, plus a range of new merch.
