9th & Walnut

Named for the intersection in Long Beach where beloved SoCal punks Descendents had their first practice space, <i>9th and Walnut</i> is a collection of re-recorded songs the band wrote at the beginning of their career, between 1977 and 1980. They started this project back in 2002 with Descendents' original four-piece line-up—singer Milo Aukerman, guitarist Frank Navetta, bassist Tony Lombardo and drummer Bill Stevenson—but abandoned it in 2008, when Navetta died of diabetes. Now, in 2021, their nerdy brand of melodic hardcore stands the test of time: Their eighth studio album is 18 tracks in 25 minutes, full of fierce bursts of societal frustrations (“You Make Me Sick”), surfy bass (“Tired of Being Tired”) and tributes to LA punk legends like Dianne Chai of The Alley Cats (their punk-pop hit “Nightage”). Hear new versions of Descendents’ earliest recorded material, “Ride the Wild” and “It’s a Hectic World”, sung by Aukerman for the first time, and bask in their sped-up cover of The Dave Clark Five’s ’60s beat hit “Glad All Over”. It is the stuff of legends.