LA Punk Band X Announce Breakup, Final Tour & Album

Los Angeles punk rock band X will break up at the end of the year, but not without releasing a final album and embarking on one more tour.

Taking to social media yesterday (25 June), the band announced that their ninth and final album, Smoke & Fiction, will be released on Friday, 2 August. The album release is led by the single Big Black X, a gritty rock and roll tune that fits nicely in X’s impressive discography.

Smoke & Fiction will be released via Fat Possum Records and is now available to pre-order via the band’s website. You can find more details here. Check out the tracklist and the music video for Big Black X below.

 “X is a great band name; also a bad idea sometimes when it gets lost in print or on the marquee,” the band’s singer, Exene Cervenka, remarked about the album in a statement (via Consequence Of Sound). “Gotta have a sense of humour. We all did in the early days.

“Los Angeles was a carnival of weirdness back then, with leftover traces of silent movie stars, long-haired hippies, bikers, and brand new self-defined punks doing anything we wanted. When we started touring the country, we found like-minded people everywhere, and somehow, they found us. Even if the X was lost on the old marquee.”

The band’s line-up—lead vocalist Exene Cervenka, bassist and vocalist John Doe, guitarist/saxophonist Billy Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake—are the original members of X, which formed in 1977. Zoom left the band in 1986 and returned in 1999.

Despite a slow period in the 90s, X properly reunited in the 2000s and have toured ever since.

In 2020, X dropped their first album in 27 years, Alphabetland, leading up to the new announcement of their ninth and final album.

X begin a massive farewell tour across the US on Sunday, 7 July, and wrap up on Wednesday, 30 October. More dates are due to be added to the schedule.

X – Smoke & Fiction Tracklist:

01. Ruby Church
02. Sweet Til The Bitter End
03. The Way It Is
04. Flipside
05. Big Black X
06. Smoke & Fiction
07. Struggle
08. Winding Up The Time
09. Face In The Moon
10. Baby & All