Descendents announce new album 9th & Walnut

(Image credit: Ed Clover)

Punk legends Descendents have announced a new album.

9th & Walnut will be released via Epitaph Records on July 23, and will feature recordings made by the Descendents line-up that recorded debut album Milo Goes To College: vocalist Milo Aukerman, bassist Tony Lombardo, drummer Bill Stevenson, and late guitarist Frank Navetta, who died in 2008.

The recordings that make up 9th & Walnut – named after the band's rehearsal space – were made in 2002, a period during which which the band re-recorded instrumental versions of the first 17 songs they wrote together between 1977 and 1980, plus a version of the Dave Clark Five's 1963 hit Glad All Over. Aukerman finally added new vocals last year.

"We just practiced and practiced," Stevenson tells Rolling Stone, "and we got [the songs] all up to speed. We tried not to upgrade them or make them fancier than they were. We tried to just leave them how they really were back in the day.

The first song to emerge from the new album is Baby Doncha Know, originally written well before Aukerman joined the band.

"Baby Doncha Know was maybe the fifth song we learned,” says Stevenson. “We would go out to 9th & Walnut every weekend and practice all day. I mainly just remember being in awe of how ‘a kid my age, who goes to my high school’ could have written all these cool songs.

"Frank seemed to have a maturity beyond his years. I never asked him who or what it was about. I was just happy to be there with him and Tony”.

9th & Walnut is available to pre-order now.

9th & Walnut tracklist

Sailor's Choice
Crepe Suzette
You Make Me Sick
Lullaby
Nightage
Baby Doncha Know
Tired of Being Tired
I'm Shaky
Grudge
Mohicans
Like the Way I Know
It’s A Hectic World
To Remember
Yore Disgusting
It's My Hair
I Need Some
Ride the Wild
Glad All Over

Descendents - 9th &amp; Walnut — (Image credit: Epitaph Records)

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.