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The Descendents are an American punk rock band formed in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1977, by guitarist Frank Navetta, bassist Tony Lombardo and drummer Bill Stevenson as a power pop/surf music band. In 1979, they enlisted Stevenson's school friend Milo Aukerman as a singer, and reappeared as a melodic hardcore punk band, becoming a major player in the hardcore scene developing in Los Angeles at the time. They have released eight , three , three compilation albums, and four extended play. Since 1986, the band's lineup has consisted of Aukerman, Stevenson, guitarist Stephen Egerton, and bassist Karl Alvarez.
After a six-month trial with a female singer, Cecilia Loera, they recruited Milo Aukerman as their new vocalist after Navetta and Lombardo got tired of singing. The addition of Aukerman led the band to write shorter, faster, and more aggressive songs in a hardcore punk style. They later released the Fat EP in 1982. It was a record which established the band's presence in the southern California hardcore punk movement with its short, fast, aggressive songs.
For the recording of their debut album Milo Goes to College in June 1982, the band worked at Total Access Recording in Redondo Beach, California, with Spot, who had also engineered and produced the Fat EP. While still short and fast, the songs on Milo Goes to College were also melodic. Aukerman later reflected: "It's interesting: we started very melodic, then moved to hardcore, but melded the two at a certain point and became melodic hardcore." The album's title and cover illustration referenced Aukerman's departure from the band to study biology at the University of California, San Diego. The illustration was done by Jeff Atkinson, based on earlier by a high school classmate of Aukerman's named Roger Deuerlein, who had drawn comic strips and posters depicting Aukerman as the class nerd.
A note on the back of the LP read "In dedication to Milo Aukerman from the Descendents", and was signed by the other three members. Aukerman later recalled that the band took his departure in stride:
When I decided to go to university, the guys in the band were pretty hip on it because they knew how big of a nerd I was. Like, "What else would you expect him to do but to go off and be a geek?" I mean, I've got a Ph.D in biochemistry — how uncool is that?
The band continued performing for a time with Ray Cooper on vocals, who would switch to rhythm guitar, when Aukerman made return visits to Los Angeles. At the same time, Stevenson had also joined Black Flag, intending to be in both bands at once but soon finding it too difficult due to Black Flag's touring and recording schedule.
With Aukerman in college and Stevenson in Black Flag, the Descendents went on hiatus from 1983 to 1985. During this time Navetta burned all of his equipment and moved to Oregon, while Cooper and Lombardo performed as the Ascendents.
After three tours in support of I Don't Want to Grow Up, the band recorded Enjoy! in March and April 1986 at Radio Tokyo studios in Venice, California. Drummer Bill Stevenson acted as record producer of the album, working with recording engineers Richard Andrews and Ethan James.
The lyrics of "Hürtin' Crüe" derived from a high school classmate of singer Milo Aukerman who had earned a score of 1420 on the SAT, gaining him entry into the United States Military Academy. Gloating about his accomplishment, he sang a taunt with the lyrics "I am better than you / You are a piece of poo / 1420". Aukerman incorporated these lyrics into "Hürtin' Crüe". The cover artwork for Enjoy! was drawn by guitarist Ray Cooper under the pseudonym "Scoob Droolins". Rather than printing the song titles on the reverse of the album's sleeve, the band instead replaced them with various for feces.
The band supported Enjoy! with a tour through the Summer of 1986. Following the tour both Carrion and Cooper left the band, and were replaced by Karl Alvarez and Stephen Egerton, respectively, from the Utah band Massacre Guys. In 1987 New Alliance was sold to SST Records, who re-released Enjoy! on compact cassette and compact disc. The cassette and CD versions added two additional tracks: "Orgofart" and "Orgo 51". "Orgofart" consists entirely of the band members cheering each other on as they fart into recording equipment, a technique also used in "Enjoy", while "Orgo 51" is a heavy metal-influenced instrumental track.
One week later, on Stevenson's birthday of September 10, Stephen Egerton and Karl Alvarez moved from Salt Lake City to fill the vacant guitar and bass positions. All was recorded in January 1987 at Radio Tokyo studios in Venice, California, with recording engineer Richard Andrews and was record producer by Stevenson. Dez Cadena sang backing vocals, while Stevenson created the album's cover graphics and Alvarez provided illustrations for the sleeve and liner notes.
The album was themed around the concept of "All", which had been invented by Stevenson and friend Pat McCuistion during a fishing trip on Stevenson's boat Orca in 1980. According to singer Milo Aukerman: "While drinking all this coffee in the midst of catching mackerel they came up with the concept of All — doing the utmost, achieving the utmost. The more they got into it the more it turned into their own religion; it's partly humor, but it's also an outlook on how to conduct your life: to not settle for some, to always go for All." Stevenson described the concept of "All" as "the total extent", and he and McCuistion had quickly written several short songs that would later be recorded by the Descendents, including "All" and "No, All!", written "in a fit of Allular frustration. The songs were only seconds long, but that was all the time we needed to make the point." McCuistion also shared writing credit on "All-O-Gistics", a musical set of commandments for achieving All, including lyrics such as "Thou shalt not commit adulthood", "Thou shalt not partake of decaf", and "Thou shalt not suppress flatulence". In a June 1987 interview with Music magazine, Stevenson elaborated on the "All" concept:
I'm really into "ALL"' and I've waited a long time to unleash the whole concept on people. And now I'm going to do it ... It's just a way of thinking, in which there are extremes and there is this goal called 'ALL.' It's a way that I created in dealing with achievement and satisfaction and how the two relate. Basically just to avoid stagnation... going for "ALL" and never being satisfied and just wallowing in your own sameness.
Aside from the concept of "All", other songs on the album such as "Coolidge", "Pep Talk", and "Clean Sheets" dealt with themes of broken relationships, while "Iceman" was loosely based on the play The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill. The album was released through SST Records, who had purchased the Descendents' previous label New Alliance Records that year and also re-released all of their previous albums. All was released in LP album, compact cassette, and compact disc formats, the latter two containing the additional tracks "Jealous of the World" and "Uranus". The band supported the album with a 60-day Spring 1987 tour, followed by the 50-day Summer "FinALL" tour, so-called due to Aukerman's decision to leave the band to pursue a career in biochemistry. Recordings from these tours were used for the Liveage! (1987) and (1989). Following Aukerman's departure the band added singer Dave Smalley of Dag Nasty and rechristened themselves All, a change Stevenson claimed he had wanted to make for eight years. "Well, basically, I've been wanting to work with David for a long time; but at the same time, Milo has stuck with me for almost nine years now, so I wouldn't exactly feel right about just continuing to call us the Descendents. In a sense that would be kind of like discrediting Milo's nine years worth of effort. It's kind of like, 'Let the Descendents be my and Milo's sacred thing,' or whatever. Who knows, at some point later on we might decide that we want to get together and record something.
On December 16, 1987, during the recording of the first All album Allroy Sez, Pat McCuistion died when his fishing boat sank during a storm. Stevenson remarked that "He had 15,000 pounds of fish onboard, so I guess you could say he died in heated pursuit of All. He was always the '5th member' of the band, besides being my best friend, next to Milo."
Everything Sucks was recorded in June and July 1996 at The Blasting Room, a studio built and run by Stevenson in Fort Collins, Colorado. Original Descendents members Tony Lombardo and Frank Navetta made appearances on the album: Navetta wrote the song "Doghouse" and both he and Lombardo played on it, marking the first recording by the original Descendents lineup of Aukerman, Lombardo, Navetta, and Stevenson since Milo Goes to College in 1982. Lombardo also played on "Eunuch Boy", a song he and Aukerman had written fifteen years earlier. According to Aukerman: Eunuch Boy' is the first song I ever wrote, really. When we formed, Tony Lombardo, the original bass player said, 'Dude- you need to write some songs,' and I had never written a song before so I just wrote down some words and brought it to him. He made the music for it." Lombardo also wrote and played on "Gotta", which was left off of the album but released as a B-side on the "When I Get Old" single. Chad Price sang backing vocals on the album, while Stevenson and Egerton produced and engineered it.
All had previously been signed to major label Interscope Records for 1995's Pummel, but were dissatisfied with the experience. Both All and the Descendents signed to Epitaph Records, who released Everything Sucks, the subsequent All albums Mass Nerder (1998) and Problematic (2000), and the All/Descendents double live album Live Plus One (2001). It was rumored that Epitaph would not sign All without getting the Descendents as well, but Stevenson explained that the arrangement was made because Epitaph head Brett Gurewitz would allow both bands to make albums at their discretion:
When we signed with Epitaph it was for both bands. It was a thing of knowing Brett forever, and so I just sat down and said, "Well, we want to make records!" At the time we were leaving Interscope. We weren't happy with Interscope at all. So we sat down and told them we wanted to make both All and Descendents records whenever we want, at our choosing. Brett and I worked out a deal like that, so it was really flexible and we could basically do whatever we wanted.
The Descendents supported Everything Sucks with a series of tours from September 1996 to August 1997 covering the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe, touring with Swingin' Utters, the Bouncing Souls, the Suicide Machines, Shades Apart, Guttermouth, Less Than Jake, Handsome, Electric Frankenstein, Social Distortion, Pennywise, H2O, and others. Music videos were filmed for "I'm the One" and "When I Get Old", and both songs were released as singles in Europe.
For the release of Cool to Be You the Descendents signed to Fat Wreck Chords. Label head and musician Fat Mike was a longtime fan of the band, and his enthusiasm for working with them was a major factor in their decision to sign to the label. Stevenson commented that "If you've got the owner of the label saying he wants to put out a record by what is probably his favorite band of all time, that's rad. That's the best possible position for a band to be in." The album was preceded by the 'Merican extended play in February 2004, followed by the full-length album in March. Cool to Be You was released in both compact disc and LP album formats, with a cover illustration drawn by Chris Shary depicting the band's Milo caricature drawn on graph paper.
In October 2008, founding member Frank Navetta died after "becoming ill over the course of a few days". The official website of the Descendents gave its grief to Frank, "We're very sorry to announce that founding member of The DESCENDENTS, and close friend Frank Navetta died on October 31, 2008 after becoming ill over the course of a few days. This is obviously a huge loss for the DESCENDENTS family. His contribution to the band, and to music in general can not be overstated. Frank will be truly missed."
In 2010 the Descendents reunited again for a series of gigs. According to Milo, the reunion is not an official reformation. He classified these as "one-off shows", usually occurring when he is able to take advantage of vacation breaks as working as a biologist to perform with the Descendents.
A documentary called Filmage documenting the story behind the Descendents and All premiered at Bloor Hot Docs cinema in Toronto on June, 15th 2013 as part of the NXNE Music and Film festival. Directed by Matt Riggle and Deedle LaCour, Filmage had a limited theatrical run in Los Angeles starting September, 26th 2014 and was released in the US and Canada on VOD, Digital and Blu-ray/DVD September, 30th 2014.
In May 2015 it was announced by Stevenson that the band had been working on some demo songs for a new album, which could possibly be released mid-2016. On April 22, 2016, it was announced that the band's next album, Hypercaffium Spazzinate, along with an accompanying EP with five bonus tracks from the recording sessions entitled Spazzhazard would be released through Epitaph in July.
On June 7, the debut single from Hypercaffium Spazzinate, "Victim of Me", was released on all streaming services. In July 2016, Milo announced he would be leaving his scientific career to pursue the Descendents full-time, citing burnout with biochemistry and getting laid off from DuPont.
In 2020, they released a single to streaming services, entitled "Suffrage" and including two songs, "On You" and "Hindsight 2020".
On May 4, 2021, the band put out a single called "Baby Doncha Know" and announced their eighth album that would be released on July 23 titled 9th & Walnut, named after the intersection in Long Beach, California, where their first rehearsal space was located. The album was recorded primarily during a 2002 session featuring the original lineup of Stevenson, Frank Navetta, and Tony Lombardo, with Milo Aukerman recording his lead vocals for the album at home in Delaware during the COVID-19 pandemic. It contains eighteen songs written by the band between 1977 and 1981, including re-recorded versions of "Ride the Wild" and "It's a Hectic World". The album serves as the band's first recording since Everything Sucks to feature this "classic" lineup.
Bill Stevenson attributed the change of their sound to the band's invention of the "Bonus Cup": "We took ⅓ of a cup of instant coffee grounds, added some hot water, threw in about 5 spoonfuls of sugar, and proceeded to play 10 second songs. The Bonus Cup became a part of everyday Descendents life." Aukerman later recalled: "We started drinking too much coffee; 'cause of that and the addition of me, the music became very quick and all about bursts of energy. It's interesting: we started very melodic, then moved to hardcore, but melded the two at a certain point and became melodic hardcore."
During the band's first reformation, the songs got longer, darker, and more experimental. Enjoy! was marked by the use of toilet humor, with references to defecation and flatulence in its artwork, the title track, and "Orgofart". It also displayed a darker, more heavy metal-influenced sound in songs like "Hürtin' Crüe", "Days Are Blood", and "Orgo 51", with other songs recalling the pop-influenced punk of the band's previous efforts.
In addition to appearing on much of the Descendents' merchandise and promotional materials, the Milo character has been reinterpreted by other artists for all of the band's releases since 1996:
Milo Goes to College has been included in several lists of noteworthy punk albums. Spin has listed it several times, ranking it No. 74 in a 1995 list of the best alternative rock albums and No. 20 in a 2001 list of "The 50 Most Essential Punk Records", and including it in a 2004 list of "Essential Hardcore" albums. In these lists, critic Simon Reynolds described the album as "Fifteen Cali-core that anatomize dork-dude pangs with haiku brevity", while Andrew Beaujon called it "Super clean, super tight, super poppy hardcore about hating your parents, riding bikes, and not wanting to 'smell your muff.' In 2006 Kerrang! ranked it as the 33rd greatest punk album of all time. The German edition of the Rolling Stones The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time ranked it at 349.
In 2016, a Descendents branded IPA entitled "Feel This Coffee" was released by the San Diego branch of Mikkeller. It is named after a track from their 2016 album Hypercaffium Spazzinate.
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