Los Angeles punk rock band Bad Religion announced they’d be releasing some more singles this year to make up for the delayed concerts while they have time to record. Singer Greg Graffin made the announcement through an interview with Jonathan Clarke via his Q104.3 New York radio station.
“Good writing is really a time of reflection, and it happens at times like these.” Graffin commented, “So I think creative bands can be in a really good mode right now of producing material. As far as getting out there and playing, there’s only a certain number of venues, and everyone’s gonna be wanting to get out into those venues. So it remains to be seen how we’re going to partition the tours in the next year. But bands like Bad Religion, certainly, we have committed ourselves — we’ve already sold tickets, and I think those will be honored in the normal way.”
Graffin went on to talk about an upcoming ‘string of singles,’ the first of which was “Faith Alone 2020,” a symphonic piano-based track, which is unusual for a band who mostly stuck to variations of punk throughout their career. It’s a reimagination of one of their old songs, “Faith Alone” from thirty years earlier. Definitely a creative decision for them to make, and it’s easy to see why they chose that particular song given the chorus “What the world needs now/ Is some answers to our problems/We can’t buy more time/ ‘Cause our tender isn’t valid/ If your soul needs love/ You can get consoled by pity/ But it looks as though faith alone/ Won’t sustain us no more.”
The tour that was postponed was a celebration of their 40th anniversary, so it’s unfortunate that it will now be their 41st. They will be touring Europe in spring/summer 2021, including some festival dates. The rescheduled dates they were to play co-headlining with Alkaline Trio have yet to be announced and neither has the new date for Flogging Molly’s Salty Dog Cruise festival.
Recently, the band released an autobiography called Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion. It was written collaboratively by all the members, and they had plenty of material to cover from their forty years together. Since their debut album, How Could Hell Be Any Worse? in 1982, they released eighteen studio albums. The most recent was 2019’s Age of Unreason.
Photo credit: Raymond Flotat
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