Bad Religion

About

Few punk bands have left as deep a mark as Bad Religion, the Los Angeles outfit that has been rattling cages since 1980. Where a lot of punk acts keep things simple, Bad Religion built their sound around tight three part harmonies, sharp melodic hooks, and lyrics that take on religion, politics, and science without flinching. Singer Greg Graffin is the one constant across seventeen studio albums, a run that includes landmarks like Suffer, No Control, and Stranger than Fiction, the latter going gold in both the US and Canada on the strength of tracks like "Infected" and "21st Century (Digital Boy)". Their influence is hard to overstate. Green Day, the Offspring, NOFX, and Rancid all owe a serious debt to the blueprint Bad Religion laid down on Epitaph in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After a dip in fortunes at the end of the Atlantic era, they returned to Epitaph and bounced back, scoring Top 40 hits and landing their 2013 album True North at number 19 on the Billboard 200. Their most recent studio album, Age of Unreason, dropped in 2019.