NOFX has announced their new record, Double Album will be out on 2nd December.
The follow-up to the SoCal punks 2021 album – Single Album, the new LP, completes the band’s double album project ahead of a world tour in 2023, which they have announced will be their last.
Taking about the project Fat Mike said: “We have a lot of records. I’m not sure how many, I think we have 15 studio albums, with 10 more EPs, three live albums, and 45 7″s. I wanted to do a double album cuz it’s a challenge and I don’t think there’s any really good double albums out there. Pink Floyd’s The Wall is about it. Quadrophenia is pretty good… if you’re a Who fan. Definitely not White Album. I don’t think anybody else has made a good double album. Certainly not Husker Du, Minutemen, or Smashing Pumpkins.
“I really like Single Album a lot. I like every song, but the songs on Double Album aren’t quite as good. All these songs were recorded in the same month, but I didn’t finish the second album until two years later. I think it’s a very enjoyable album, and maybe our funniest. I think it is what a lot of our fans will want to hear. I think it’s a great side three and four for a double album. I believe I accomplished my goal of making a solid double album, but it just took a lot longer than I expected.”
Mike has made a career putting the self into self-deprecation, and Double Album shows that he sure as hell not going to stop now. With such future classics as the explosive opener, Darby Crashing Your Party? Punk Rock Cliche, which got dropped off Blink 182 album California after the band found out that Matt Skiba co-wrote it with Fatty, though Mike admits the Blink version of the song was better, and the bittersweet, My Favorite Enemy and Don’t Count On Me.
Then there’s Joanna Constant Teen, a 78-second tribute to the dominatrix that spent six weeks in Mike’s New York Airbnb during the production run of his musical, Home Street Home. “She just moved in and did bad things to me every night. Mike recanted: “She’d be like, ‘Mike, it’s time to write another song. Get started, or you know what will happen’ That was really cool. Obviously, I intentionally didn’t write that much” Then there’s Alcopollack about booking agent David Pollock, who has worked with NOFX for more than 30 years and lost several clients for his brazen honesty. Mike said: “I asked him if it was OK if we put this on the album, and he’s like, ‘Yeah sure, it’s mean but funny.'” While Fuck Day Six details the time Mike spent a week in a rehab run by Buddhists;”Anybody who has gotten off of opiates knows what ‘day six’ means,” Mike added. Finally,Is It Too Soon If Time Is Relative is a takedown of physicist Stephen Hawking. “I wrote that before he died,” Mike said: “It’s not quite as funny anymore because he never got to hear it.”
“You have to laugh at everything,” Mike adds, “because the world is just falling apart and you have to have a good attitude and not take everything too seriously. So this is how I’ve always done it. I make people laugh every day. I usually do it in a self-deprecating way, it’s just how I go through life: I have as much fun as I can. That’s what life is—trying to find all the happiness you can. And spreading happiness. Which is what I feel like is supposed to be my job in life—spreading joy.”
Double Album is out on 2nd December and is available to buy / stream at all the usual places.