Why Pennywise Had To Go Old School After Jim Lindberg's Return

Californian skatepunks Pennywise were at the vanguard of the '90s post-hardcore punk revival, forging a strong career on the back of propulsive and catchy music, a tireless work ethic and their ubiquitous presence in the surf, skate and snowboard videos which were so popular at the time.

Yet despite building up a sizable following all over the globe they never quite followed their peers such as Green Day, Bad Religion and The Offspring into the mainstream, held back in part by an idealistic bent which manifested in internal band conflict, and also by the alcohol-related suicide in 1996 of founding bassist and songwriter Jason Thirsk. Nonetheless Pennywise persevered and retained their cult status in the punk community, until in 2010 frontman Jim Lindberg left the group citing fatigue and was unceremoniously replaced by Zoli Teglas of Ignite. This union culminated in 2010 album All Or Nothingbut was split asunder when Teglas suffered a serious back injury, leaving the door ajar for Lindberg to rejoin the band he'd started more than 25 years earlier.

Their first release since the reconciliation is a compilation entitled Yesterdays, which includes some early Thirsk compositions (dating back to before their eponymous 1991 debut) as well as some offcuts from around the time of 1997's Full Circle – it's a batch of songs chosen by design to remind both the band and their fans of what Pennywise stood for as a fledgling outfit back before their troubles balancing art and commerce began.

“It's a fun record, and that's really important,” Lindberg reflects. “It's got some of that youthful spirit – these are songs that we wrote a long time ago, and which kinda represent our band when it first started out, so I think that vibe is throughout the record and people are going to be stoked on it.

“I think with me coming back to the band after some time out it was important for us to reconnect with why we started and the roots of the band. It seemed to have kind of gone astray towards the end there, which is a common thing to happen to bands when they've been doing it for as long as we had – around 20 years – and it's hard not to get in a rut where you're just doing album and then tour, album and then tour and not repeating yourselves. I definitely think that if we were to just jump back into trying to write new songs it would have been confusing for Pennywise fans in 2014, so it was really a way for us to reconnect with these old songs and the original spirit of the band. We always had this batch of songs that I knew were really fun and a little bit more carefree than some of our later stuff – I always wanted to put it out so I'm glad that we got to do it.”

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