I’m sure that the five characters comprising Fake Names would baulk at the term “supergroup”, but as their collective CV lists Minor Threat, Refused, OFF!, and The Faith (amongst others) no other word will suffice. Bringing all their experience to bear, the band have developed a unique sound that’s at once hard and tuneful, laying a solid foundation with two critically-acclaimed albums. It’s something they’ve built upon with their third long player Punk Ruins, a record that finds the band widening their sonic palette to deliver a dozen tracks that find the band rising, phoenix-like, towards a bright future.

Fake names aren’t the kind of band to waste time and if proof were ever required you need look no further than opening track ‘Until Normal’. There’s no elongated introductions or rambling preambles, Fake Names kick this album off like a size ten Dr Martens smashing through your speaker and a steamroller of a riff that seems certain to crush everything in its path. It’s a circular kind of track and one that’ll soon beat down any resistance you might have, the band conspiring to create an impenetrable wall of sound that’s built from caustic vocals, nifty drum patterns, blocks of riffs and, most importantly, a focus on melody. It’s the last which is the thread that stitches this album together; Punk Ruins is in perpetual motion with a feeling that it’s barrelling headlong towards the future, meaning that it veers into different musical territory and it is this that acts as an anchor and ensures they don’t veer too far off course. It’s a melodic sensibility that’s intrinsic to American punk and hardcore which ensures that no matter how rowdy things get (and Fake Names do get rowdy; check out the windswept title-track), there’s a groove and a swing underpinning proceedings to render each of these twelve tracks catchy and strangely danceable.

Whilst many original punks had an aversion to the album as a format (it was a scene built around the 7”, after all), Fake Names seem to have embraced it and have served up a record that ebbs and flows like an old school LP. After the furnace blasts of the opening tracks, Punk Ruins opens like a lotus flower to reveal different facets of the band’s oeuvre; ‘Diamond Buzz’ is wide and expansive, inserting plenty of white space so it becomes a sonic vista in which it is quite easy to become lost. There’s mid-paced rockers like ‘If You Could See Me Today’ that are painted with shades of Shocking Blue and sit alongside the primal roar of ‘Scream’ quite effortlessly. Pulling all the various strands together, ‘Paradise’ is an anthemic closer and one that will stay with you long after the disc has stopped spinning.

Punk Ruins finds Fake Names building a bright future.

• Punk Ruins is released via Epitaph on 23rd October 2026.

Track List:

1. Until Normal
2. Good Old Days
3. Punk Ruins
4. Cover The Distance
5. What I Tell Myself
6. Diamond Buzz
7. Language Lost
8. Beautiful Scars
9. If You Could See Me Today
10. Little Wonders
11. Scream
12. Paradise