The band that put Californian pop-punk on the map, Descendents return after a 10-year absence with a new album, Everything Sucks. From his suburban home in Wisconsin, vocalist Milo Aukerman speaks with True Punk.

Archival September 1997 Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with Descendents’ Milo Auckerman.

Hey Milo, have you really been away at college all this time, since Descendents broke up in 1987?
I’ve been doing biological research on plants. That’s what I do, I do genetics on plants. But I stayed loosely associated with the ALL guys through that period. I did backing vocals on their Breaking Things record and they’ve always sent me demos of their stuff so I could give them input on the music.
So I’ve been in science for the past ten years but I’ve kept in touch, especially with Bill (Stevenson - drummer), he’s been my best friend for many years. But yeah, I got my PhD in 1992 so I guess if you include undergraduate work and graduate work, it took me nine years.

Aside from contact with the ALL guys, did you have any association with music during that period?
I was actually in a band for a year and a half called Milestone in 1989. It was just a band that was more of a hobby that I did during graduate school for a short time. Other than that, it’s just been the Descendents all along.

I guess the reformation album didn’t take much prompting?
Yeah, it came about basically because I started writing music again in January or February and I called up Bill and asked if he wanted to help me with some of the songs and if he wanted to record some of them. And it just turned into a fully-fledged record over the course of a couple of weeks of working on the songs. So, mainly I got back into writing music because I needed an outlet for my frustrations, and music has always been my favourite outlet.

It’s nice to see the band has retained its Thou Shalt Not Commit Adulthood maxim on the album?
Kind of one of the reasons I got back into this was because I was living a very adult life in science and I was missing a lot of the more youthful, fun stuff that we used to do when I was in the band. Music always keeps you young no matter how old you are and we’re still not committing adulthood. Ha! Part of me doing this music again is my way of re-discovering the joy of it and the fun of it.

You get to be nerds too!
Exactly! I feel like I have a personal kind of mission to celebrate nerd-dom, basically. I mean obviously I spent the last ten years being a nerd and now I’m returning from nerd-dom and trying to convert others to the faith, ha ha. I’ve been a nerd since high school and it’s something I cannot escape, something I cannot deny in myself. So I just want other people to see how great it is, ha ha!

It’s certainly great to hear a new Descendents record … will this just be a one-off album?
No, I still have a bunch of new songs that I’ve written and if all goes well in the next year we should be able to record another record. I can’t guarantee it at this point but I would say that I think it’s very likely that more stuff would come out. I’ve done the science thing for many years now but over the next year I would like to focus more on music because I’m having so much fun doing it right now. I’ve been enjoying writing songs that, in the past, is something I was never prolific at. I’m now pounding out song after song and it’s fun!