It’s a feverish night in California, the smell of crammed bodies acrid in the graffiti covered squat bar. Punks crouch on bare boards overlooking the stage, relaxed and grinning, as the crowd pack intimately close to the band onstage, their hair drenched in sweat. The guitarist is a scrappy kid, always smiling, drowning in oversized shirts. The bass player pauses at the back of the ramshackle stage, his posture relaxed. He’s young too, painfully so, his fingers a blur and his face a mass of concentration.

Looking at photos now of those nights at the legendary Gilman Street, the first thing that strikes you, aside from how young the band are, is that the images depict the genesis of something great. Operation Ivy, the seminal So-Cal ska punk act onstage that evening dissolved after one perfect album, and half of them would form Rancid, arguably the most successful modern punk band in the world. Tim Armstrong on vocals and guitar and his childhood friend (and Operation Ivy bandmate) Matt Freeman would recruit Armstrong’s roommate Brett Reed on drums. Lead guitarist Lars Frederiksen would join later, Rancid being his second choice of band after British oi outfit UK Subs. This seems fitting as Frederiksen was also Rancid’s second choice of guitarist after a certain Billie Joe Armstrong, who had some other band he wanted to prioritise.

Their second album, ‘Let’s Go’, brought Rancid MTV airplay and a prestigious slot supporting the Offspring, but it’s their third album ‘…And Out Come The Wolves’ which is the ultimate Rancid manifesto. With a string of singles that have stood the test of time with their catchy choruses and a fully formed street punk, middle finger up energy that permeates their sound, Rancid lived the gritty punk life they sung about, translating it into intelligent lyrics and resolutely strong bass hooks. Fourth album ‘Life Won’t Wait’ is now considered Rancid’s equivalent of the Clash’s ‘Sandinista!’ in light of its experimentation with reggae, and their self titled hardcore record released in 2000 has earned its place in the Rancid pantheon over time.

Then came the awkward, disjointed years of Rancid, the ones that even the die-hard fans skip over. In 1995 Armstrong would meet a young Brody Dalle and the couple would marry two years later, and divorce six years after that. The divorce inexplicably led to Rancid taking a pop direction on ‘Indestructible’, then a brief foray into musical theatre, radio shows, multiple hiatuses, and a change of drummers: in short, all the classic indicators that a band is splintering.

Frederiksen doubled down on his skinhead image, writing songs about his favourite sex workers and being Danish with the Bastards before forming the Old Firm Casuals. Armstrong wrote P!nk’s ‘Trouble’, which earned her a Grammy in 2003, started a fifty-song solo project, made collages of skeletons and discovered The Interruptors. Freeman became the frontman of Devil’s Brigade, survived lung cancer in 2005 and started a family. Half-heartedly, Rancid limped onwards into the twenty first century. Their albums under the Rancid name in this period were inconsistent, with each solid single embedded in track lists which were just not that good.

Just when we were ready to write Rancid off as a nostalgia band for older millennials with lower back problems, they dropped ‘Tomorrow Never Comes’ last year. Simply put, it’s everything we hoped for in a Rancid album. Vocal duties are shared between Armstrong, Freeman and Frederiksen, and their singing voices are restored to pre-chainsmoking levels. The songs are short, brutal, smart and invigorating, just as we remember on Rancid’s early records, and make you want to throw the nearest heavy object at a wall just to see what happens. Despite a reliance on the big hits on their UK tour in 2023, Rancid brought the live electricity that always characterised their shows. A switch inside the Rancid apparatus had flicked back to the right direction and they proved they can make the punk rock that we always knew they were primed to at a moment’s notice.

Let’s fast forward to now to these re-releases or, more accurately, rewind to 1992. Rancid’s first EP was a vinyl-only release, zealously guarded by collectors, but it’s now been flung back into the daylight. And it’s blistering. Harder than any of their other releases, it just doesn’t sound thirty years old, rivalling the intensity of anything Knocked Loose can hurl at a crowd. The hideous snarl on ‘Battering Ram’ is pure old school punk vitriol and ‘I’m Not The Only One’ prowls through distortion and desperation to seek a deeper purity. “I’m not the only one who’s not afraid of you,” they scream, raging against the same machine that’s still ruining our lives. The trademark incomprehensible slur of a track with an Armstrong lead vocal is already established, but it doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to hear the words, or understand them, to understand the passion behind them. In our present age of Fox News and (at the time of writing) partisan election coverage in the UK, ‘Media Controller’ seems like it could have been recorded now in a disused warehouse by a band looking for the elusive ‘authentic feel’ rather than three decades ago.

Rancid have never released a ‘Best Of’, though their ‘All The Moon Stompers’ comp of their rudeboy era comes close, but they’ve inched towards a retrospective with their other surprise drop, the ‘B-Sides and C-Sides’ rarities collection. You always got your money’s worth with a Rancid single, and their B-Sides were never B-List, making that £1.50 you spent in HMV or Virgin Megastore in the 90s worth every penny. ‘The Brothels’ might even have been your first introduction to Rancid, given it’s inclusion on the first ‘Give Em The Boot’ compilation in 1997, and it still gets the blood rushing to your head today with it’s siren guitar and stomping pace. The simple message behind ‘Tattoo’ is the same thread Frank Turner would pick up years later: if you really like something, you could get it permanently inked on your body. That’s your choice. Rancid’s gentler side comes out too on the practically tropical ‘Things To Come’, a cocktail of anti-racial commentary, horns and cloudy rocksteady. Their flirtation with ska continues on ‘I Wanna Riot’, and like many punk bands of the nineties, the clicking siren call of the ska beat called out to Rancid. They never added the gloss of a full ska-punk sound to their experimentation, and keeping the gritty street-punk energy high for ‘I Wanna Riot’ makes it an endearing song.

The beautiful, and hideous, part of looking back on photos of Gillman Street shows and listening to early Rancid is that you realise ultimately how little anything has changed. Of course, some of the fashion looks a bit dated and there’s no way the legendary 924 Gillman Street wouldn’t have been turned into a gentrified juice bar by now, but other than that, it’s all still the same. Rancid grew up as rough kids who ran with gangs and bikers, finding solace in the brotherhood they developed amid the struggle of their early lives. The number of people in Southern California living in poverty jumped by 2% in 2023, and listening to Ceschi Ramos of Codefendants channel his experiences with crime and subsequent incarceration into soulful punk lyrics just hammers home that the world that Rancid reacted against is still very much our reality.

There’s an appetite for the old school punk sound that grows every day – just look at the fact Frank Carter’s shows with three quarters of the Sex Pistols sold out before they even technically went on sale – and younger bands like Noah and the Loners are taking up the same torch that was lit in 1977. Of course, both the newest wave of punk and the OG bands are important, but without the bridge that Rancid built across the divide, the purely punk section of the scene would be divided, or, even worse, dominated by the names that can pack stadiums and no one else. 

As with most ideas, Joe Strummer of the Clash summed it up best. He released his solo albums on Armstrong’s imprint, Hellcat Records, and recorded the intro to Armstrong’s compilation DVD about a year before his death. Calling Armstrong a ‘Punk Rock Warlord’, they’re filmed in black and white, shaking hands while looking down on a city, the wind muffling the microphone and making the iconic singer’s words indistinct. “Hellcat over the city, Hellcat over the world…” he sighs in satisfaction, “forever and a day.” The legacy Rancid have built up is rooted in the punk in the most original musical sense of the term, but also with re-releases like these, it’s still strikingly fresh with a lot to offer the world. May it last forever and a day.

KATE ALLVEY

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Rancid’s ‘Rancid’ EP and ‘B Sides and C Sides’ are out now on Epitaph Records