BAD RELIGION Bassist Talks Next Album, Band's 30th Anniversary

Rob Sleigh of Room Thirteen recently conducted an interview with bassist Jay Bentley of the California punk rock legends BAD RELIGION. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Room Thirteen: You're currently working on a new album. How is that going?

Jay Bentley: Really good. We're probably just about at the halfway point. In a typical BAD RELIGION way, the songs are coming together. We're throwing around album titles and visual ideas. It's kind of how we've been making things for thirty years. Probably at the very last minute, we'll come up with an album title and some photograph, sequence the record and it will come out. [Laughs]

Room Thirteen: What can people expect from the album?

Jay Bentley: Right now, one of the things that I can tell you is it's f**king fast. [Laughs] I'm not saying it's all fast, but the fast songs are some of the fastest we've ever done. It's like: "This is fun."

Room Thirteen: How would you compare it to the stuff you've done in the past?

Jay Bentley: In a weird way, I've heard Greg and Brett both saying that if our last three records were the [1988's] "Suffer", [1989's] "No Control" and [1990's] "Against the Grain" of the 2000s, then this would be [1993's] "Recipe for Hate". I said, "You're leaving [1992's] "Generator" out," and Brett said, "Yeah, but that's intentional." Then, listening to the material, it sort of is "Generator" mixed in with "Recipe for Hate". There's gonna be a lot of stuff that's gonna surprise people on this record.

Room Thirteen: BAD RELIGION will be playing some shows in the U.K. this August. Is the setlist likely to cover the entire thirty-year history of the band?

Jay Bentley: I'm hoping. At the festivals, we won't have the amount of time that we had [in the U.S.] doing Thirty Songs for Thirty Years, because that would take about an hour and a half. I always try to make the setlist all encompassing, but I usually miss an album or two. Generally, there's always going to be someone saying: "You didn't play this song." We have two-hundred and eighty songs, we can't play them all. [Laughs]

Room Thirteen: Which festivals will you be playing here?

Jay Bentley: The exciting one is the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool. Then we have a bunch of headlining shows around the country, which is super-exciting. I don't think we've been there for a while.

Room Thirteen: Will you be playing some new songs as well?

Jay Bentley: Maybe. We were playing a couple of new songs [in the U.S.] when we were having our anniversary shows. We'll see. It's just so early yet. We won't really know until we get there.

Room Thirteen: Do you think we will be celebrating BAD RELIGION's 40th anniversary in 2020?

Jay Bentley: [Laughs] No. Yes. I don't know. I can't see why not, but we've always told ourselves that the minute we're no longer having fun and the minute we're no longer relevant, we're finished and it's not going to be some long, drawn out farewell. It's just going to be: "That's it, we're done." All I know right now is, on a day-to-day basis, we're still having fun, we're still playing music that we love and we don't feel like we really have to do anything. It's all stuff that we want to do. We haven't really been in a better place mentally, but, physically, I don't know. Ten more years? [Laughs] Fat Mike [of NOFX] has been going around saying that when we break up, they get to play for five more years because they're five years younger than us. So we're not going to break up until they break up. [Laughs]

Read the entire interview at Room Thirteen.