“Life is hard, but it's still beautiful. Stop picking the hard shit to look at—look at the beautiful stuff too. Lighten up.”

Lighten Up (Fat Wreck Chords) the SoCal punk group Bad Cop Bad Cop’s fourth full-length, paints a striking portrait of life’s hard-won victories and hard-fought losses. 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 Migs (Sublime, Slightly Stoopid, Long Beach Dub Allstars. 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.”