The Offspring have been working on 'Let The Bad Times Roll' for almost a decade.
The Offspring's Dexter Holland
This will be the group's first album since 2012's 'Days Go By' and they explained they have been working on the songs over the past nine years while lead singer Dexter Holland, 55, got his PhD in molecular biology.
Lead guitarist Noodles, 58, told musicfeeds.com.au: "We’ve been doing a lot though, Dexter went back to school and we’ve been touring four or five months of every year around that. But really the reason is that the record wasn’t done until it was done. We’ve been working on it, off and on for pretty much the whole nine years and we finally got to a point where we thought we’ve got a good record, it’s time to let the fans have it.
"With 'Days Go By' we’d finished our contract with Sony, so we didn’t have a record label telling us that we had to get this done, there was no deadline, other than any we chose to set ourselves."
Dexter added: "We were left to our own devices and that might have been part of the problem!"
'Let The Bad Times Roll' references opioid addiction and mental health issues and the band said they wanted to address what is happening in the world right now.
Dexter explained: "'Let The Bad Times Roll'….we’re writing about the world that we are living in and what we’re seeing around us. So that includes things like opioid addiction and what you would call mental health issues, I think 10 years ago we would have called that depression, but it’s now being seen in a bit of a different light.
"One of the things that we’ve always loved about punk rock and that drew us into the bands that we liked, was that they weren’t afraid to put out those types of messages. If it was dark and needed to be said, it was said. I like writing about issues that I feel are important and that need to be talked about.
"I think like everyone else, the last couple of years seems to have brought on a growing sense of frustration, and you can feel what I want to call a sense of social anxiety if you know what I mean? Whether it’s things going on politically or socially or what have you. And now of course with the pandemic, it has just escalated it to another degree. So being able to get those ideas out and talk about them and vent, there’s something I think that is definitely cathartic about punk rock music because it’s so angry and so energetic that you feel like you get it out of you."