Fat Mike, if asked to describe Single Album, would probably reply that it’s business as usual and if you dig NOFX, you’ll love this record. And, while he’d be right about the fact that if you’re down with NOFX, you’ll fall for Single Album in a big bad way, he be wrong about it being business as usual, because there’s nothing usual about this record, and that’s what makes it so gosh darned magnificent.

While it’s true that it’s packed to the point of bursting with an unholy amount of fast, and more subdued, riffs, rhythms, melodies and choruses that crawl inside your brain and make every pleasure centre tingle with near orgasmic joy, that isn’t want makes this musical testament to self realisation, acceptance and loss one of the sure fire contenders for the record of this or any year even though it’s still only February.

Nope, that isn’t it at all. What elevates this record to the pantheon of the punk rock gods and ensures that it will live forever in the Halls of Hardcore Valhalla, is the wry humour and brutal honesty with which the subject matter for each of its songs is delivered in an atypical my heart is on my sleeve and this is who I really am manner. If you can make it all the way through I Love You More…, My Bro Cancervive… , Grieving Soto or Your Last Resort without having you heart feeling a little heavier then, I don’t know, maybe you’re a robot or one of those lizard folks that the conspiracy nuts are so fascinated with, but whatever you are, you’re not human.

That’s what makes this record so sublime, the fact that it is so… human. That it reaches out and makes a connection with it’s audience on a primal, fundamental level and that it does it in such a pure, unadulterated, couldn’t give a fuck punk rock way. They did it, NOFX finally went and did it and released a record that proved what I’ve always known for the thirty years that this band has been a part of my life. That one day they would take their rightful place as some of the best songwriters of their, or any other generation. Bravo… Tim Cundle