Bad Cop Bad Cop

In the final moments of “Dead Friends,” the penultimate track of the new Lighten Up, Bad Cop Bad Cop guitarist-vocalist Stacey Dee sings, “So try to love your life, while you can.” These words serve as a powerful thesis for Lighten Up (Fat Wreck Chords) the SoCal punk group’s fourth full-length. The album paints a striking portrait of life’s hard-won victories and hard-fought losses.

“I think that’s what I write my songs about,” Dee says. “Life is hard, but it's still beautiful. Stop picking the hard shit to look at—look at the beautiful stuff too. Lighten up.” Dee and her bandmates—bassist-vocalist Linh Le, drummer-vocalist Myra Gallarza, and new guitarist Alex Windsor—know what it takes to persevere.

Resilience surfaces throughout Lighten Up. In “Strugglinh,” Le confronts self-doubt and finds strength, and in “See Me Now,” she turns family loss into triumph. “Straight Out of Detox” details a transformational night in Dee’s life, and “Note to Self” is her reminder to keep things in perspective, aided by iconic LA underground rapper 2mex.

Playing like a big-hearted sibling to the Jim Carroll Band’s iconic “People Who Died,” “Dead Friends” has been in the works for years. “This was the first time that I dug in to tell stories that I was too afraid to talk about prior,” Dee says. “We've made records that were unapologetically strong, but the way we got to be unapologetically strong was dealing with things like this.” 'Unapologetically personal' best describes Lighten Up.

“It started with having the girls over on Sundays. I would cook brunch, we’d drink tons of bottles of Prosecco, and we would write music together,” Dee says. “This was family the entire time. It was who we trusted, who we loved, who we knew we could work with.” That’s why Bad Cop Bad Cop recorded at the Compound in Long Beach, home to veteran producer Antoine Arvizu (Sublime, Ryan Bingham). The band loved recording the singles “Shattered” and “Safe and Legal” there in 2023 with Arvizu and Dee’s partner, Migs (Sublime, Slightly Stoopid, Long Beach Dub Allstars). “The way that Miguel produces, he lets you be you until something needs to be added or reeled in. He always says, ‘Never a dull moment on a record,'” Dee explains. Bad Cop Bad Cop stretched their signature hooky, melodic punk into unexpected places, like the jazzy “Las Ventanas,” the dub-inflected “Note to Self,” or “Johnny Appleseed,” a reimagining of the Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros classic.

After tracking the instruments, the band spent 10 intense 12-hour days recording vocals with longtime collaborator John E. Carey Jr. (Old Man Markley, NOFX, Get Dead). “The singing was the most important part for us. We really tried things out,” Dee says, adding that Gallarza stepped up to sing third harmony for the first time.

Lighten Up also benefits from Windsor, an expert guitarist who not only shreds (check out the end of “I4NI”) but whose music theory knowledge proved invaluable. “Alex's guitar playing is just so fantastic and has really elevated our songwriting, truly,” Dee says.

Everything about Lighten Up feels elevated and genuine. “This was the first time we didn’t give a fuck about what anyone else was doing or wanted us to do. Lighten Up was for us” Dee says. “We had a complete and total ball making it and we love it so much.”

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