PENNYWISE LIVE! | Lincoln Theater in Raleigh NC
Pennywise
“Pennywise is probably one of the most influential punk bands of my genre. I remember hearing the song “Home Sick” from their record “Unknown Road” while watching a skate boarding video. My friends and I were big skaters at the time and would watch some of our favorite skaters VHS tapes and try to emulate their tricks. During one of those video watching sessions Pennywise was playing in the background of one of the videos. I had to then watch the end of the VHS to find out what band it was. The rest was history after that. One of my favorite songs to this day is still is “Peaceful Day”. Their style of punk music felt hard with deep guitar riffs and strong bass lines. Some of the punk bands of that era had an overall higher pitched tone to it and pennywise seemed to have gone the opposite way in that regard. Pennywise is still playing strong and even played the last Van’s Warp Tour this year with a somber goodbye to an iconic music festival. They played at the Lincoln theater in Raleigh NC and came out strong as the crowd pushed against the barricade trying to get a pit started. They sounded just as I remembered them with the same power, angst, lyrical and vocal domination of Jim Lindberg. Even as the group gets older with Jim himself reaching 54 years old they still are undoubtedly one of the greatest punk bands to have ever come out of California and are still a band you need to see live.”
Pennywise is an American punk rock band from Hermosa Beach, California, formed in 1988. The band took its name from the evil clown monster from the Stephen King horror novel It.
Between their 1991 self-titled debut and 2005's The Fuse, Pennywise has released an album every two years on Epitaph Records, a label owned by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz. To date, the band has released twelve full-length studio albums (the latest being 2018's Never Gonna Die), one live album, two EPs and one DVD. Although their first two studio albums were critically acclaimed, Pennywise would not experience worldwide commercial success until the 1995 release of their third studio album, About Time, which peaked at number ninety-six on the Billboard 200, and number fifty-five on Australia's ARIA Charts. The band's mainstream success was signified by a growing interest in punk rock during the 1990s, along with fellow California bands NOFX, Rancid, Blink-182, Bad Religion, Green Day, The Offspring, Lagwagon and Sublime. By 2007, the band had independently sold over three million records worldwide, making them one of the most successful independent punk acts of all time.
Pennywise's current line-up consists of Jim Lindberg (vocals), Fletcher Dragge (guitars), Randy Bradbury (bass) and Byron McMackin (drums). They had kept their original line-up together until bassist Jason Thirsk died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1996, due to issues with his alcoholism, after which Bradbury joined as his replacement. In August 2009, Lindberg decided to leave the band; he was replaced in February 2010 by Ignite singer Zoli Téglás. With Téglás, the band recorded their tenth studio album All or Nothing, which was released on May 1, 2012. Lindberg rejoined the band later that year after Téglás was sidelined by a back injury.
Pennywise has released a new album with some amazing tracks that still prove they kick ass. You can check out the information below to pick up your copy!
