The Offspring - Supercharged - Structures Capable Of Joy

The Offspring – Supercharged

★★★

Released October 11th, 2024 on Concord Records

I saw The Offspring a few years ago. It was an arena show, which is about what you’d expect from a band with as many big Nineties hits as them. That is, of course, completely anathema to the whole concept of punk but that’s a discussion for another time. The opening act were Sum 41, and the bare truth is that the opening act outperformed the main act. Sure, The Offspring’s set was good – all the hits, a couple of old numbers you appreciate hearing – but there wasn’t a huge amount of showmanship or energy in it. That makes sense, given that the members of the band are now old men, and punk rock is a younger man’s game. Still, Sum 41, who aren’t appreciably younger, blew the lid off the place.

So there weren’t high expectations for new Offspring music. There haven’t really been high expectations since Americana, their last consistently good album. They’ve sort of descended into same-old since then, and on one hand Supercharged doesn’t do much to dispel this trance. For a band that stated off as sorta fresh ripping punk rock in the early 1990s, they turned into cartoonish pop punkers awfully quickly. Money is like that, I suppose. Tracks like “Ok, But This Is The Last Time” and “Get Some” sound like a band trying to recapture the glories that got them on the radio without realizing that the moment that those songs fit to is long gone.

Still, they manage to pull off something better than they have a right to. The opening track “Looking Out For #1” throws out some misdirection. I fully expected the record to follow the same tired path laid out there, where the band sounds like they’ve lost a step and are decaying slowly. That’s only half correct. While there are a lot of places on this record that sound like that, tracks like “Light It Up” and “Truth In Fiction” come out swinging. They’re not as fierce as their counterparts on their Nineties run, but they’re also better than a lot of the crap on their last five records. There is crap here as well, of course – you don’t put out nostalgia albums without a lot of filler – but there are moments that remind you why people loved The Offspring in the first place.