Descendents gorge on early material for upcoming album 9th & Walnut

Never ones to want to grow up, the Descendents have dusted off their earliest tracks and enlisted their earliest members for the upcoming album 9th & Walnut, a record nearly four decades in the making. Line-up changes are nothing new for Southern California’s pop-punk godfathers. On 9th & Walnut, which the band began recording in 2002 and features mostly previously-unreleased songs from the group’s Ride the Wild-era of the late 70s, they welcomed original bassist and guitarist Tony Lombardo and the late Frank Navetta, who died in 2008, back into the fold. Almost two decades since the sessions began, Descendents singer Milo Aukerman and drummer Bill Stevenson finished the record during quarantine and are ready for fans to hear the songs they, Lombardo, and Navetta wrote nearly 40 years ago.

The songs on 9th & Walnut, many of which were written upon the band’s formation in 1977 and entered setlists before Aukerman joined the group, will be the first Descendents album to feature prominent roles for founding members Lombardo and Navetta. Lombardo last appeared on 1985’s I Don’t Want To Grow Up. Meanwhile, Navetta left the band after their landmark 1983 album Milo Goes To College. However, both made cameos the group’s 1996 record Everything Sucks—though they were officially replaced by guitarist Stephen Egerton and bassist Karl Alverez in the late 1980s. Egerton, Alverez, and Stevenson produced a record with Lombardo in 1990 for the TonyAll album, New Girl, Old Story.