The Codefendants: LIFERS

The Codefendants are an anti-supergroup. You have a poet felon in Ceschi Ramos, the singer from Get Dead in Sam King, and the legendary Fat Mike from NOFX. What does that translate to? A genre-bending (they call it Crimewave style), refreshing powerhouse of sound that will have something to please absolutely everyone.

"Rivals" kicks us off and is immediately a standout track. It features a guest spot from hip-hop legend The D.O.C., showing off melodic hardcore verses, quick spat raps, and backing tracks that transition with ease to give each verse its own feel. This songs winding path perfectly sets us up for the crazy journey we are about to be taken on.

"Lonely Life" channels something akin to Linkin Park. It changes tempos on a dime to flip from a mid-tempo verse to a raging chorus. This song shows off expert lyricism and structure with a catchy hook that will absolutely get stuck in your head. An instant classic and presumably the first single.

The Sublime-like "Art of Protest" follows with textured backing tracks. It mixes nontraditional aspects like violins with reggae beats and features Fat Mike's first solo appearance. It is one of the more subdued songs and ends abruptly. It is still a great track, but a return of the strings to walk us out would have been nice.

Seemingly channeling "I'm a Believer," "The Fix" comes in speeding things up. It is an 80s and NOFX hybrid that overlays a street punk and melodic hardcore style, insisting on blending as many genres as possible with a disco beat underlying the entire song. Lyrically, this should have been the album closer. However, its placement is great for the overall pacing because of what comes next.

"Lifers" slows us down with an acoustic comedown. It masquerades as a heartfelt message while actually delivering a raw song of rejection against dependence. It picks up the pace about halfway through and lays down some of the heaviest lyrics at the end: "This is how you write a eulogy / We'll never fall in line / Some lessons we'll never learn." The writing is pure poetry.

"Crime Wave" continues the sonic onslaught. We hear hints of Operation Ivy, H2O, and Rancid underlaid by a jazz piano. It opens with a 70s style guitar twang that honors the likes of "Johnny B. Goode" and features some of the best drum and cymbal work on the entire album.

"Bad Business" is a Spanish-intro fueled rager. It feels more like a hard rock track than a punk ballad. It has the vibe of Sum 41's darker side but turned all the way up to eleven.

"Right Wrong Man" starts with a doo-wop style bassline and a ska-infused riff. That leads to a hard rock verse, which drops into a restrained rap, which leads to even more wild changes. You can easily see the ambition here. This style hopping is crazy and admirable. The most important thing is that it actually works. It feels organic. Choruses be damned, each portion of these songs sounds unique but flows together without ever feeling disjointed.

"The Weather Men" is a massive departure from what we have heard up to this point. It is sung nearly entirely in Spanish over a delicate Latin groove with guitar slides and background riffs. The lyrics speak of rebellion, but a societal one rather than just rejecting the mainstream. It is something with real ramifications and a visceral edge: "For our freedom, sometimes we need to kill. / Is it really committing a crime / if none of us do any time?"

We close with the piano-driven "Ditch the Party", the most like NOFXey song on the album. A song about growing up and dealing with the destruction you have left in your wake. It tackles the challenge of traversing societal acceptance while getting older and simply not caring anymore. The rapping to close us out is possibly the best on the album. It leaves us on a high note, always leaving them wanting more.

The Codefendants don't shy away from the topics currently creating rifts in families, friend groups, governments, and online spaces. They also don't shy away from style mixing, creating a unique and trendsetting sophomore album. This release will hopefully raise their stock, digging deep into punk rock history with a call to arms that is not just a surface-level anti-establishment decree. They are asking us to fight in several different forms. We need to fight conformity, trends, governmental oppression, depression, and addiction. All of this is wrapped in the thoroughfare that we are in this together, suggesting maybe we should try being nicer to each other in spite of political or philosophical leanings.

Album of the year? Maybe. We are not even halfway through 2026 yet. But I can easily see this album being the one people look back on several years later and say it pushed a genre into something entirely new. It is a template for impersonators to cling to. They take all the chances, sometimes multiple times in individual songs, making an album with eleven tracks that do not sound anything like the one prior. The album literally ends with the lines, "we don't care / we do it our way."

They certainly did.