Naked Raygun 7" Series, Tour, LP

Influential Chicago punks return with singles series, eye tour and new album.

By Blurt Staff

Influential Chicago punk rockers Naked Raygun announced today that they’ll enter Transient Sound studios in their hometown to track new material. The songs—the band’s first new stuff since 1997 when they issued the anthology-plus Last of Demohicans—will be pressed for a singles series.

The band—the final pre-breakup roster of drummer Eric Spice, bass player Pierre Kezdy, guitarist Bill Stephens and vocalist Jeff Pezzati—originally reformed in Fall 2006 for Riot Fest in Chicago. The show’s success prompted them to continue. At a recent two-nighter at the Chicago House of Blues, they played their first new songs in seventeen years to the delight of the crowd. In press release speak: “…[the songs were] met with a reaction of surprise and elation from the slam dancing crowd… [and] embody the classic ‘Chicago Sound’ that Naked Raygun first defined more than twenty years ago.”

The songs will be among those released in the 7” series, put out on Riot Fest Records, who eyes a tentative Fall 2009 street date. “Once the 7” series ends Naked Raygun plans to hole up in their rehearsal space for a while then re-enter the recording studio to track their first proper LP since 1990’s Raygun, Naked  Raygun.” The band will tour the East Coast in September, for the first time in two decades Philadelphia’s Paint It Black and Chicago band Shot Baker will open." And naturally, Naked Raygun will headline Riot Fest 2009 in Chicago this October, along with peers and old friends Rights of the Accused, No Empathy and Wax.

Naked Raygun East Coast Tour

September 9, 2009

The Mideast (Cambridge, MA)

with Shot Baker

September 10, 2009

First Unitarian Church (Philadelphia, PA)

with Paint It Black, Shot Baker

September 11, 2009

Ottobar (Baltimore, MD)

with Paint It Black, Shot Baker

September 12, 2009

The Music Hall of Williamsburg (Brooklyn, NY)

with Paint It Black, Shot Baker

September 13, 2009

Maxwell’s (Hoboken, NJ)

with Paint It Black, Shot Baker