The Lawrence Arms - Skeleton Coast

“The Lawrence Arms have done it again. Skeleton Coast is a graceful late-career album that stands tall next to their classics.” – Brooklyn Vegan (INTERVIEW)

“a brilliant and retrospective return with Skeleton Coast” – PunkNews (4.5/5 REVIEW – INTERVIEW)

“in its aim to find light within the darkness, does just that, proving to be a beacon of hope within the sea of uncertainty that is 2020” – Louder Than War (8/10)

The Lawrence Arms’ seventh studio album, Skeleton Coast is out now. Recorded in Tornillo, TX, a border town of Mexico, at Sonic Ranch Studios with longtime producer Matt Allison, the album marks the band’s first new release in six years.

The album contains the elements of the band’s sound that fans have come to love for the past two decades but recontextualizes them in a way that somehow sounds perfectly aligned with this strange time in our collective history. Although it was written and recorded before the Coronavirus upended the world, the band’s seventh studio album sounds eerily prescient as it imagines an apocalyptic future where coyotes croon and wolf packs roam free. “For a band who has been around as long as us, this is about as urgent of a record as we could make,” vocalist and bassist Brendan Kelly explains. “It may be kind of dark but it’s really about searching for light in the darkness and finding it, as small as those moments may seem. That’s sort of where we’re at: Collecting the scraps of things that could make for a bearable existence in dark times.”The Lawrence Arms have never had any agenda apart from just having fun and making good music. Since forming in Chicago in 1999—the trio of bassist/vocalist Brendan Kelly, guitarist/vocalist Chris McCaughan and drummer Neil Hennessy—have made albums that continually challenge the boundaries of their sound. In the process they’ve carved out a distinctive identity in the punk community that’s simultaneously gritty, beautiful, melodic and mutinous.