JAY BENTLEY: Next BAD RELIGION Album 'Has To Be Pretty Concise About What We Wanna Put Out There'

In a new interview with Chile's Sonar FM radio station, bassist Jay Bentley of punk rock legends BAD RELIGION was asked about a possible follow-up to the band's "Age Of Unreason" album, which came out in 2019. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Me and Brett [Gurewitz, BAD RELIGION guitarist] and Jamie [Miller, BAD RELIGION drummer] went into Jamie's studio [last year] and had a few songs to write. Brett really liked what he was doing until we recorded it and then he took it home and said, 'I'm not really into it anymore.' [He] changed his mind about what he wanted to do. And I think, my gut tells me that that's probably the thing that this band is going to have to answer to itself if we're gonna make another record, is what does that sound like? What does that record mean? What does it look like? Because we don't need to have album number 18 be the same or worse than album number 14, or we just don't know what to say. So it has to be pretty concise about what we wanna put out there. Otherwise, why would we do that?"

After the interviewer noted that "Age Of Unreason" contained a lyrical message that was very critical of then-U.S. president Donald Trump and that there must be plenty of lyrical inspiration for new BAD RELIGION material based on what is going on in the world right now, Jay said: "I always think that if we focus on a person or even a country, we're limiting ourselves to the things that are important to everyone. One of the things that I remember, when we put out 'Age Of Unreason', there were a lot of people who liked Donald Trump, who were very mad at us about this record, and my gut told me that we shouldn't have been writing a record about Trump; we should have been writing a record about these people [who voted for him]. 'Cause Donald Trump is, he's a pimple on a pig's ass. But these people are who put him there. These are the people that put him where he is. So, I wanna know what's going through your fucking mind. I'd much rather be writing songs about what's the human nature that wants this. What is the human failing that wants this?"

Asked if he thinks that the world is going through an "immense ideological regression" at he moment, Jay said: "I do. I do think that. And that's the part that keeps me awake. Like other people, the only thing that I can think, like, what changed, what happened? And it's fucking this [pointing to his smartphone] — it's this. This is what changed. This is what happened. Everybody has it in their hand. And people figured out, 'Oh, fuck, I can tell these people anything I want. I can make shit up and have people just zombie out and follow me right into the pits of hell.'"

He continued: "For us as a band, if you wanna know, the most American record we've ever written was [1988's] 'Suffer', because we were 20-year-old kids that didn't have a passport and we'd never fucking left Los Angeles. But after 'Suffer', we started traveling the world and started seeing how other people lived and what other people thought. And when we got home to make [1989's] 'No Control', we wrote it from a whole different perspective of, like, 'What does it mean to be a human on planet earth?' And that same thing still applies in 2026. It just has to. You can't just say America is — you can't just say America is anything. 'cause everybody already knows that. But what we can say is what do we have in common? What is it that we all have in common? You, me, a man waking up in Dubai or a kid waking up in Berlin, what do we all have in common?"

BAD RELIGION formed in 1980 in the suburbs of Los Angeles and celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2025. The band has become synonymous with intelligent and provocative West Coast punk rock and are considered one of the most influential and important bands in the genre. BAD RELIGION has continually pushed social boundaries and questioned authority and beliefs armed only with propulsive guitars, charging drumbeats, thoughtful lyrics and an undying will to inspire and provoke anyone who will listen.

The band released its seventeenth studio album, "Age Of Unreason", in 2019. The critically acclaimed record offered a fiery and intensely relevant musical response to the times, with songs that address a myriad of socio-political maladies, including conspiracy theories, racist rallies, Trump's election, the erosion of the middle class, alternative facts and more. There was a stylistic consistency to the band's iconic and influential sound — hard fast beats, big hooks and rousing choruses, yet each new song remained distinctive, utilizing composition, melody and lyrics to deliver a unique narrative consistent with the band's longstanding humanist worldview.

In December 2020, BAD RELIGION celebrated its 40 years of making music with "Decades", a four-episode online streaming event captured live at The Roxy Theatre in Hollywood, California. The band felt it important to commemorate the conclusion of 2020 as a strange moment in history when they reached that 40-year milestone. The celebratory episodes included live performance footage, exclusive interviews, and a peek at their rehearsals leading up to the taping of "Decades".

In August 2020, BAD RELIGION released its autobiography, "Do What You Want: The Story Of Bad Religion", written with the group's full cooperation and support. It reveals the ups and downs of the band's 40-year career, from their beginnings as teenagers experimenting in a San Fernando Valley garage dubbed "The Hell Hole" to headlining major music festivals around the world. The book predominantly features the four principal voices of BAD RELIGION in a hybrid oral history/narrative format: Greg Graffin, Brett Gurewitz, Jay Bentley and Baker. It also includes rare photos and never-before-seen material from their archives.

Photo courtesy of Mutiny PR / Beachwood Entertainment Collective