Kill Lincoln is arguably the most influential band in ska today. I’ve been writing music reviews for two years now, covering non stop new releases. However, last year I wrote an article about my favorite album. I had the idea to write about a series of album that were released before I started writing music reviews, albums that shaped my current tastes that I didn’t get to cover when they released. That idea never materialized, so the only album I wrote about was Kill Lincoln’s 2020 album, “Can’t Complain”. With this single, Kill Lincoln has announced a follow-up album set to release on September 27th titled “No Normal”.
Back before 2020, Kill Lincoln’s lead singer Mike Sosinski founded a record label to promote ska bands called “Bad Time Records” – a reference to how it was a bad time to be in a ska band, as the genre was in a decade long lull with few major bands, low interest, and very little fan engagement. Now Bad Time Records is arguably the largest and most successful ska record label, the genre has made a significant return, there are hundreds of ska bands putting out albums every year, and crowd sizes are constantly growing. In 2023 Bad Time Records put on a national tour featuring primarily bands on their own label and filmed it for a documentary that was released this summer. The tour sold out rooms that serve 1000 people, a far cry from a half decade earlier where the same bands were playing to under a dozen people.
With running a record label, filming and releasing a full length documentary, I didn’t expect new music from Kill Lincoln this year, so seeing them drop an unannounced music video caught me off guard and completely blew me away. The song is an absolute banger. It picks off exactly where the last album drops off, with incredible, fast paced punk and ska, aggressive guitar and drums that drive the pace, horns that manage to keep up, and realistic lyrics that are focused on a mental health journey.
If you’ve never heard Kill Lincoln, they fit somewhere in the vein of Link 80, Suicide Machines, and, perhaps Less That Jake- but so much more than any one element or band. If their last album was one of the most influential albums that inspired me to start writing about music, this song shows every bit of that same promise and more. Mike Sosinski has since said that this album expands in many ways, and more vocals are sung by other members of the band, which excites me to see what ways they change. Their previous album may be one of my all time favorites, but if this album remains too close to the previous sound, it would lose a lot of the appeal. This is the most excited I’ve been for any album this year.
Check out the video here, and stay tuned for 27 September!
Written by Gimp Leg