Fake Names is breaking a three-year silence. The punk supergroup’s third studio album, Punk Ruins, arrives Oct. 23 via Epitaph, and the band has kicked off the campaign with the video for “Until It’s Normal,” an opener that doesn’t waste time going after people buying into today’s fascist propaganda.
The lineup behind Punk Ruins reads like a punk rock roll call: guitarists Brian Baker (Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, Bad Religion) and Michael Hampton (S.O.A., Embrace, The Faith), vocalist Dennis Lyxzén (Refused, INVSN), bassist Johnny Temple (Girls Against Boys, Soulside), and new addition Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket From The Crypt, OFF!) on drums. Together, they’ve built a sound that fuses D.C. post-hardcore with modern power-pop, and Punk Ruins uses that combination to pick apart political manipulation and modern-day social anxiety while still holding onto punk’s core sense of catharsis.
The album was tracked at Chicago’s storied Electrical Audio with producer Matthew Barnhardy (Superchunk, Bob Mould), a pairing that Fake Names says pushed the record past genre lines into something that’s equal parts furious and fun. It is available to pre-order here.
The turnaround was fast. Baker laid out just how fast: “We recorded twelve songs in five days, and all of them are on the album,” he explains, adding that Lyxzén knocked out his vocals in a single session.
Asked how the band managed to land on something this cohesive in such a short window, especially compared to how long some of their other projects spend in pre-production, Baker credited the prep work everyone did independently beforehand:
“One of the advantages of us all working at home is there’s plenty of time to figure out what you’re going to do. I know what the guitar solo is going to be because I’ve already done it at home and sent it to Michael to tweak it. It’s not as hard as you think.”
Baker described the record as a genuinely collaborative effort, one where half the fun was watching ideas mutate once the full band got hold of them: “This album is a collective expression and a lot of the fun is seeing how the hell it is going to turn out.”
He pointed to how the rest of the band’s musicianship pushed his and Hampton‘s initial sketches somewhere neither of them expected. “Diamond Buzz” rides a hypnotic groove, while the title track leans into the band’s D.C. hardcore roots, with Lyxzén‘s vocals sharpening hooks that were already plenty sharp.
Baker calls Fake Names a “mutual admiration society,” a band built on blending 1970s U.K. punk with classic hardcore attitude and guitar-forward power-pop. The self-titled debut, which landed in 2020, leaned more toward classic rock. Its follow-up, 2023’s Expendables, was produced by Adam “Atom” Greenspan (IDLES, Yeah Yeah Yeahs), who gave the band a noticeably cleaner, richer sound.
Fake Names will hit the road for a short U.S. run in February 2027, with stops in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago and more.
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