Tijuana Panthers became friends when they were teenagers in Long Beach, California, and started playing music together soon after. The trio play a garage /surf-rock, that’s is inspired by Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. The band have just released their new album Halfway to Eighty, along with the LP’s arrival, the trio have shared a video for album track “Quantum Entenmann’s”. The trio is comprised of Daniel Michicoff (bass/vocals), Chad Wachtel (guitar/vocals), and Phil Shaheen (drums/vocals).

“I feel like this was our most relaxed process yet,” says Michicoff of the band’s sixth LP, Halfway to Eighty, an album whose title serves as a sly embrace of getting older, with a little bit of the Panthers’ trademark sense of humor sprinkled in there for good measure.

On Halfway to Eighty, riff-heavy anthems like “Helping Hand” are courtesy of Wachtel, while art-rock thrashers like “Slacker” are Shaheen’s handiwork, and smirking punk numbers like “False Equivalent” are Michicoff’s. (“What good can it bring now? / We’re barely evolved” sings Michicoff on that last song, a squall of guitars swirling around his trembling tenor.) When you keep an ear out for them, you can hear each distinct personality in the songs, but taken as a whole, it’s yet another primo Panthers set of post-Cramps, post-DEVO outsider rock and roll.

That’s partially through the help of regular Panthers collaborator Jonny Bell (Crystal Antlers, Chicano Batman, The Gun Club [reissue]), Hanni El Khatib, Lovely Bad Things, Rudy De Anda), who produced the set at his Jazzcats Studio in Long Beach. Bell has proved to have something of a sixth sense in working with the band, so there was no one better to capture the sound they were going after this time, either. For much of the record, the band was working with the mindset of channeling some of the production sound and attitude of local punk legends like Black Flag and Circle Jerks. “What I told Jonny when he was mixing ‘Slacker,’” remembers Shaheen, “was, like, ‘Just keep it South Bay,’ and he already knew what I was saying.”

Tijuana Panthers
Halfway to Eighty
Tracklist
Innovative Leisure

1. Helping Hand
2. Slacker
3. Not Your Business
4. Take Back Time
5. False Equivalent
6. Man Of Dust
7. April New Yorker
8. Quantum Entenmann’s
9. Cricket Meditation
10. Reflections
11. Beware Of Dog

Order Halfway to Eighty by Tijuana Panthers  HERE