Naked Raygun Reveal First Album in Over 30 Years With New Single

Chicago punk mainstays Naked Raygun have announced that they’ll be releasing their first new album in 31 years this spring, via Chicago label Wax Trax! Records.

To coincide with the album reveal, the band released its first single, “Living in the Good Times,” on Tuesday. The accompanying video shows the band performing on the roof of an empty music venue while wearing gas masks in a nod to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The video then cuts to Naked Raygun performing on the same rooftop in the daytime, without masks, joined by a chorus of friends and fans singing the song in a collage of at-home videos.

“Living in the Good Times” is the first new music Naked Raygun has released since a string of one-off singles in the early 2010s. The band has developed a cult following in Chicago and other punk scenes since their formation in the early Eighties, and they’ve been cited as a favorite of Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, Steve Albini (who played with Naked Raygun’s Santiago Durango and Jeff Pezzati in Big Black), Fall Out Boy, and Blink-182/Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba. “Living in the Good Times” is also Naked Raygun’s first new music since the death of longtime bassist Pierre Kezdy, who died from cancer in October 2020.