Lead single ‘Coming For You’ features some rather strange, even nonsensical couplets – “Breakdown, takedown, now it’s on/Sold out, blow out, Donkey Kong,” anyone? – but the real peak is ‘We Never Have Sex Anymore’, a blues rock dirge more suited for dad dancing than moshing. To be frank, at times, this album is bizarre. There’s a remarkable amount of filler here However, there are worse moments to come as well, the kind that will likely arouse laughter for the wrong reasons. There are better moments to come than what these tracks promise: ‘Breaking These Bones’ is angsty fun, ‘The Opioid Diaries’ is earnest and far more relevant, and ‘Hassan Chop’ offers thrilling, hypercaffeinated punk gone wild. It is telling that the album was recorded over a period of several years yet was hampered by constant delays, and it’s a wonder that track is still on there when it sounds like it should have been released four years ago.
On the one hand, it constantly misses its own point, trying to say something while at the same time saying little of substance, but the references to the 2016 presidential election, including chants of “lock her up”, feel out of date in a post-Trump world. Similarly, the following title track is musically inoffensive to a fault, even sounding rather anaemic in its chorus, but its lyricism is its real weakness. Opener ‘This Is Not Utopia’ isn’t the barnstorming introduction to the SoCal four-piece’s tenth album that we might have wanted, and lyrically it’s obvious, but its meat-and-two-veg punk sensibilities are listenable and catchy enough if you can grit your teeth through its slightly grating hook. The Offspring gets it – but they’re saying the same things that many other bands have said before, in an album that’s the punk equivalent of homework handed in after the deadline. Of course, given we’ve lived through Brexit, Trump, the opening salvos of the climate crisis and now the Covid-19 pandemic, people aren’t exactly making up problems to complain about. How many times in the last five years have you heard someone say that life just sucks? You’ll run out of fingers and toes to count them on.
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