The Lawrence Arms release new song, "Last Last Words"

Last month, Chicago-bred punk trio The Lawrence Arms announced that they will be releasing their new album, Skeleton Coast, on July 17th via Epitaph Records — their first record since Metropole was released in 2014, also released via Epitaph.

Today, The Lawrence Arms have shared the next single from the album, “Last Last Words.” The track “is about coming to terms with your own obscurity – but like, in a pretty upbeat way,” says vocalist and guitarist Chris McCaughan. “It’s an escape dream to an edge of the world while being strangely content with some undergrown adulthood. It’s part undercover love song to the sometimes beautiful randomness of the universe and part offbeat, comical reminder to keep rewriting your unknown future. Like so much of the record, the song chases tiny flashes of light in the darkness.”

Skeleton Coast was recorded 30 miles east of El Paso, TX at Sonic Ranch Studios with the band‘s longtime producer Matt Allison. “It was kind of like album camp in the sense that we were in this very remote setting for two weeks and really focusing on making the record. That was a very different experience for us because we’ve always made our records in Chicago which is home and all the things about home are in the way,” says The Lawrence Arms vocalist and guitarist Chris McCaughan.

The album contains the elements of the band’s sound that fans have come to know and love over the past two decades, all the while adding in new elements to keep things fresh. The Lawrence Arms wrote and recorded the album before the COVID-19 pandemic, but all the while sounds eerily prescient as it paints an apocalyptic future where coyotes croon and wolf packs roam free.

“For a band who has been around as long as us, this is about as urgent of a record as we could make,” vocalist and bassist Brendan Kelly explains. “It may be kind of dark but it’s really about searching for light in the darkness and finding it, as small as those moments may seem. That’s sort of where we’re at: Collecting the scraps of things that could make for a bearable existence in dark times.”

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