Milo aukerman how to#

As I was discovering this and realizing maybe I should just do music full-time, lo and behold, laid me off anyway.” “Also, working in a corporation has become a misery of sorts. “ gotten less and less interesting to me,” Aukerman explains over the phone from his home in Delaware.

The decision was a long time coming, according to the singer-songwriter, whose boxy, bespectacled likeness has appeared on five out of Descendents’ seven albums: 1982’s scrappy Milo Goes to College, 1985’s breakneck I Don’t Want to Grow Up, 1996’s hook-heavy Everything Sucks, 2004’s politically alert Cool to Be You, and now the forthcoming Hypercaffium Spazzinate, out July 29 via Epitaph. But unlike his, well, descendants, Aukerman has, in the past, described music as his “hobby” and never technically done it full-time - until now. They also helped spark the careers of modern-punk institutions like Blink-182, NOFX, and Green Day. Devoted fans of the pop-punk hero might be taken aback by this - Aukerman has pursued a decades-long career in biochemistry for nearly as long as he’s anchored his band, a staggeringly influential California four-piece that formed in the late ’70s and spat out brief, aggressive tracks about such frivolities as bathroom humor, schoolyard crushes, and not wanting to grow up. The 53-year-old still holds a degree, of course, but he’s no longer a practicing scientist.

While this is a loving tribute to Frank Navetta (who died in 2008), if you were hoping for more of the subtle but genuine forward growth the band has shown on later-day albums like Cool to Be You and Hypercaffium Spazzinate, what you get instead is a journey into the past, with all the good and bad that phrase implies.The Descendents‘ frontman, Milo Aukerman, is no longer a scientist. That's not to say this music is bad, since it isn't, but it's also the sound of the Descendents before they became the group we love today. Although the playing is probably better than it was when they were in high school, the arrangements are just as rudimentary, and, more importantly, the songs are as simplistic as they were back then.

Milo aukerman how to#

The unfortunate contradiction in this music is that it's the sound of a great punk band re-creating the sound of the days when they were still learning how to get good at this stuff the Descendents had already moved past this level of skill by the time they cut Milo Goes to College in 1982.

The idea was to put them on tape just the way they used to play them, without any effort to fancy them up, and while the project went incomplete at the time, in 2020, Aukerman and Stevenson dusted off the tracks, added new lead vocals from Aukerman, and the result is 9th and Walnut, named for the garage where they practiced in their scuffling days. In 2002, vocalist Milo Aukerman and drummer Bill Stevenson invited original Descendents members Frank Navetta (guitar) and Tony Lombardo (bass), by that point long out of the group, to come into the studio and record a set of songs from the band's earliest days that had never previously made it onto an album. For a band of fiftysomething men playing the same sort of snotty, goofball punk rock they mastered in their teens, the creative process is inherently a look into the past, but the Descendents have taken that notion and embraced it in new ways on their 2021 album, 9th and Walnut.