Los Angeles, CA · punk · melodic-hardcore

Bad Religion

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Forty-plus years of polysyllabic melodic punk — three-part harmonies over an unwavering political line, still the genre's reigning intellectuals.

Bad Religion formed in the San Fernando Valley in 1980, put together by high school students Greg Graffin, Jay Bentley, Jay Ziskrout and Brett Gurewitz. Their name, chosen to provoke, stuck through an early show opening for Social Distortion, and Gurewitz soon started Epitaph Records, which put out the band's own material and became one of the most important independent punk labels in the country.

Graffin has been the band's only constant member throughout its history. Bentley and Gurewitz have also been present for most of it, guitarist Brian Baker has played in the band since 1994, and the current lineup includes guitarist Mike Dimkich and drummer Jamie Miller.

The band's approach has stayed consistent: fast, melodic punk with dense multi-part backing harmonies they nicknamed the "oozin' aahs", and lyrics that draw on politics, religion and science with a notably large vocabulary. Records including Suffer, No Control and Against the Grain shaped the sound of Southern California melodic punk.

Bad Religion signed to the major label Atlantic in 1993. Stranger than Fiction, released the following year, went gold in the US and Canada on the strength of songs like "Infected" and a re-recorded "21st Century (Digital Boy)." Gurewitz left around that time to run Epitaph full time, then rejoined after the band was dropped by Atlantic in 2001 and returned to the label.

The band later had Top 40 hits with "Sorrow," "Los Angeles Is Burning" and "The Devil in Stitches," and 2013's True North became their first album to reach the Billboard top 20. Their seventeenth studio album, Age of Unreason, came out in 2019, and the group has sold more than five million records while continuing to tour.

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punkmelodic-hardcore