The last few years have seen the Offspring gain a new lease of life. With nine years having elapsed between 2012’s Days Go By and 2021’s Let The Bad Times Roll, the band are back, and far more quickly this time round, with Supercharged – an album they have touted as their rockiest effort in years. Reconvening with uber-producer Bob Rock (Metallica), their go-to guy since 2008’s Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace, the band turn in a tightly wound set that sees them dispatch ten songs in 32 minutes, with the covers, re-workings, and reprises that vexed some fans on the otherwise excellent Let The Bad Times Roll entirely absent.
Honestly, the album doesn’t get off to the most auspicious start. Looking Out For #1 inexplicably pairs You’re Gonna Go Far Kid with Pretty Fly and, while it’s got a great chorus, the heavily processed vocals and over-reliance on keyboards raise fears that the band’s razor-sharp guitars and incisive lyrics are going to wind up buried under Rock’s invasive production tricks across the album.
And then it happens.
Having wrong footed the listener, the opening riff to full-tilt punk rocker Light It Up reveals a band reborn, the track harking all the way back to the Epitaph years and frankly sounding like it belongs to a different record altogether. Fortunately, it’s the opening track that’s the outlier and, having steadied the ship, The Offspring successfully combine hyper-modern production with a healthy dose of punk rock for The Fall Guy, evoking the spirit of Americana and keeping things moving forward nicely in the process. Similarly, Make It All Right stays on the right side of frantic, reminding us just how deeply the band revere The Ramones. With its melodic backing and sparkling riffs, it’s a bouncy little number and likely to become a live favourite on the coming tour.
The brisk first half wraps up with OK, But This Is The Last Time. A spiritual sequel to Self Esteem filtered through the regret that comes with middle age, it manages to juxtapose bouncy guitars and a sense of heartbreak that’s given greater weight by deftly introduced strings. It’s a strong song that effectively captures the contradiction that lies at the heart of an aging band (and, by extension, their fans) – still wanting to rock but burdened by the challenges of an increasingly complex life. With the band preferring to rage against the dying of the light, however, rather than succumb to ennui, they go on to unleash a second side that gloriously dispenses with any lingering sense of restraint.
First up, there’s Truth In Fiction – a certified belter that eschews the production tricks found on the album’s misfiring opener to recapture the energy of Smash. It’s fantastic to hear The Offspring tearing away at their guitars with such abandon, and Rock sensibly gets out of their way, letting them simply rage in the studio free from any distracting additions. Things remain heavy as Come To Brazil’s stuttering intro paves the way for one of the heaviest songs the band have ever recorded. With its scorched earth verse and massive, melodic chorus, it’s something of an epic, the band even throwing in a bizarre football chant at the song’s conclusion. It’s the Offspring at their best and if it doesn’t cause your pulse to quicken, you’re not playing it loud enough.
Changing through the gears, the band fling a little surf into the mix on Get Some, Josh Freese’s punishing drums only slightly sweetened by the fun “whoo-hoo” backing vocals that pepper the chorus. Continuing their wild journey across their history, Hanging By A Thread finds the band nod to the emotionally powerful rockers found on Ixnay On The Hombre, with Dexter sounding confident and assured as he digs into a track that offers depth and power in equal measure. It leaves You Can’t Get There From Here, an emotionally charged finale, to bring the immensely satisfying second half to a suitably splenetic close, the audience liable to find themselves somewhat shellshocked in the process.
Ignoring the truly awful album artwork, which looks like an AI take on Smash, Supercharged is everything the band promised. While opening number Looking Out For #1 is perfectly fine, it misdirects the listener and, far from the album being a continuation of the more pop-oriented material found on Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace, what follows is rather more a frantic race through the band’s greatest moments. With nods to Smash, Americana, and Ixnay On The Hombre prominent across Supercharged’s run time, there’s a sense that The Offspring have effectively recaptured the lightning-in-a-bottle lust for life of their early years, and it makes for a gloriously vibrant record that will surely proves essential for the band’s legions of fans. 9/10
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