The Interrupters were ready to rumble as they entered the ring to make their fifth album—and they put up one hell of a fight doing so. In one corner, standing tall, was the undefeated frontwoman Aimee Allen, ready to uphold her heavyweight survivor title. In the other corner was a fierce foe, weighing in at 1,000 pounds of past trauma ready to take her down. But through 11 rounds of songs, the ska-punk rockers kept their dog in the fight and stayed victorious, producing one of the most knockout albums of their career. And now they’re incredibly proud to show off the Battle Scars they earned in the process.

“We really wanted to focus on the triumph and the victory and the strength that you get after going through something and being like, I’m stronger than I was before,” says Allen, diving into the Herculean messages behind the new album, which arrives January 29 on Epitaph/Hellcat Records. “It was about honoring that feeling rather than focusing on the bleeding wound, you know? We can acknowledge the suffering, we can acknowledge the pain, but let’s really focus on the fact that we went through it and how far we’ve come.”

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Allen has been training for this moment pretty much all her career. Since 2011 when the Montana native first teamed up with the So Cal Bivona brothers (guitarist husband Kevin and his twin brothers, bassist Justin and drummer Jesse), so many of the Interrupters’ songs have shown Allen’s threshold for painful subjects. She’s been incredibly open about personal trauma and violence experienced during an abusive childhood and struggling with addiction and mental health as an adult. All a part of her journey to learn how to “Take Back the Power” and implore others to do the same when faced with oppression.

Battle Scars, though, is Allen at her most vulnerable, a record where she shares that what literally didn’t kill her made her stronger. “Lyrically, it’s about the battle to stay sane and sober and how it almost killed me. It actually did kill me,” she reveals, explaining that the grueling focus track “Back from The Dead”—where she fearlessly sings about her heart stopping and flatlining—is a true story. “I had a near-death experience that I haven’t talked about publicly. I don’t want to talk about it publicly. But I definitely had an experience on the other side, and there’s a bit of it in the lyrics of that song. …It was basically my goodbye letter to alcohol.”

As we all talk—Aimee and Kevin in their crowded home studio in Southern California and Justin and Jesse in their lookalike garage studio about 35 minutes away—it’s just a few days before Allen’s sober anniversary. “It’ll be 11 years,” she says, rightfully beaming at the accomplishment and knowing it could’ve been such a different story. 

But the story Battle Scars wants to tell is not about falling, but about surviving. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the harrowing “Back from The Dead” is quickly followed by the jump and jive ska song “One More Trip,” in which the Interrupters celebrate living to see another birthday and receiving the gift of “365 more days to come.”

“I’m so happy that you picked that up, because that’s exactly what we were trying to do with the song,” Allen affirms, “to show it’s all about the rebirth and the celebration of life and how it is so beautiful. Each day is a gift. And each day can be celebrated,” she adds, widening her perspective into a missive for anyone struggling to find the bright side in these dark days. “The world feels like it’s on fire, and yes, you can wake up in the morning and easily focus on the world being on fire. Or you can look at the ones closest to you and be like, you know what? Today I’m not even going to look at the news and this horrible bombardment we’re getting every day. I’m gonna put my phone down and I’m gonna just be in this moment with my family.”

The Interrupters have taken that message even more to heart recently. In the time between making their last album, 2022’s In the Wild, and Battle Scars, both Jesse and his wife Stephanie as well as Kevin and Aimee welcomed babies. Although they understandably want to keep most details private, the band members can’t ignore how welcoming the newest members of the Interrupters family did make recording Battle Scars a bit more challenging.

“When we made records [before], we’d lock ourselves in that room [Jesse and Justin are in right now] until it was done,” says Kevin, referencing the ancient past when they agonized over the 2014 self-titled debut, 2016’s Say It Out Loud, 2018’s Fight the Good Fight, and In the Wild.

“It’s way different than it used to be,” Jesse jokes.

“But our whole thing is family, right? Our band is a family, and family always comes first,” Allen chimes in with the important PSA. “And we just figured out a way to have our families be a part of this recording process.”

That meant meeting just one day a week—Tuesdays—and expanding the inner circle to include some vital blood brothers from their punk family. First was the return of Tim Armstrong, who served as co-producer and lent vocals to “One More Trip.” The Rancid frontman has long been a mentor and collaborator of the Interrupters (previously working with the Bivona brothers in his Tim Timebomb side project) and signed the band to his Hellcat Records imprint on Epitaph more than a decade ago.

“He pitched this idea of recording on a two-inch analog tape, which forces you to commit in the moment because it’s a high-wire act. The tape’s rolling. And if you mess up, you gotta rewind it and erase it. So, it kind of forced us into this thing where we had to move kind of quick,” says Kevin, giving an insider view of Battle Scars. “And that meant Aimee singing live to the band on tape. The vocals you’re hearing is Aimee with probably two hours of sleep, but you’d never know it because the intensity of the performance is there.”

Also in the studio with the band was Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph owner Brett Gurewitz, who the band has worked with on every album and refers to as their trusted “third ear,” as well as Operation Ivy’s Jesse Michaels, who helped co-write a few songs and added vocals to “Stranger,” and Blink-182 maestro Travis Barker, who lent his talents to “Wild Heart,” “Unbreakable,” and “Warrior Spirit.”

As the Interrupters have started to leak some of the studio footage onto their social media accounts, which shows the punk tour de force surrounding them, many fans have pondered what it would have been like to have been a fly on the wall in the A-list sessions.

“I’ll tell you,” Kevin says. “Because I’m both in the band, working on the record and have known all those guys for years, but also the whole time in my head I was thinking that if you told 13- or 14-year-old Kevin this was going to happen, he’d be like, I don’t believe you. I really tried to be present in the moment and be like, I don’t even care what happens because this is happening. But the songs turned out great, too.”

“Never in a million years would I think that that would be a studio session I would be a part of, and it blew my mind,” says Jesse, who had no problem giving up his drum seat for Barker. “How could I? I grew up loving him as the drummer for Blink-182 … It was like an out-of-body experience, and it took me a long time to actually put it into perspective.”

That studio environment also gave the Interrupters inspiration to make Battle Scars a true sandbox moment, one in which they played with their signature sound more than ever. The album opener “Warrior Spirit” is a prime example, coming off like Blondie meeting up with the Clash on a let-loose industry night at CBGB. “I might have been a little heavy handed with the synthesizers,” jokes Kevin with a playful “oops” wink. It was also notably the first time the Interrupters used a drum loop in one of their songs.

The band played the song live for the first time a few weeks ago at Mission Bayfest in San Diego and Kevin swears, “It did not stick out like a sore thumb; it’s still an Interrupters song.” 

Still, some fans have had knee-jerk reactions to the change in sound heard in some of the previews shared on social media. “I did see some comments like, ‘where’s the ska punk?’ And I wanted to comment back so bad, like, do you realize that the guitar in the right ear of that song is Tim Armstrong playing his Operation Ivy guitar? It doesn’t get much more ska punk than that!” Kevin jokes. Plus, there’s plenty of the Interrupters’ hallmark style to be found on Battle Scars, like the anthemic punk venom of “Scorpion” and “Unbreakable” and the horn-heavy “Harboring Vengeance.” As Kevin also argues, the group has always been heavily inspired by two-tone English ska bands from the ’70s and ’80s bands like Fun Boy Three and General Public, who toed the line between new wave and punk. “It’s all punk rock to me.”

“I also feel like with this particular record, we weren’t trying to be like, this is the genre and this is the box that each song is in,” adds a supportive Allen. “We were throwing genre completely out and asking, what does this song want to be? Let’s just honor that. It’s why I think the whole record is this very cinematic thing. Each song is its own world.”

One of the songs that plays out most like a movie is the album ender “Legacy,” a powerful punk pop ode to two important women in the Interrupters’ story who sadly passed on. One was Allen’s grandmother, who she was extremely close to, and imbued the “Warrior Spirit” they sing about on Battle Scars.

“The week of her funeral, I came back and I wrote that first verse and that first chorus on a voice note, and it took me a long time to even be able to sing it. I couldn’t finish writing it. I couldn’t even talk about it,” Allen shares. The song sat idle for about a year until the band had another encounter that reminded them thatpeople’s spirits stay with you long after they are gone. At the end of their tour in 2024, the Interrupters were approached by the Make-A-Wish Foundation to meet with a fan named Violet from Hawaii who had a terminal illness and passed away not long after the band met her. Just thinking about her again now brings everyone to tears.

“She was supposed to travel out to a show and meet us in person. And then we got the word that she wasn’t going to be able to do so,” Kevin recounts. “So, we came up with this idea where we would FaceTime her from the stage and the whole crowd said, “Aloha!” It was a beautiful moment. She got to watch the last couple songs in our set, and then we went back to our dressing room and FaceTimed with her for a couple of hours.”

“We only met her once, but she changed our lives forever,” adds Allen, wiping away tears. “She was so full of joy and gratitude and love. And her spirit was so beautiful, and her family is so beautiful. This song is a part of honoring her.”

As Kevin notes, the Interrupters have written tracks about losing people in the past, such as “Love Never Dies” and “Room with a View.” But “Legacy” was different. “It was more about what part of them lives on through us, like how could we be their legacy?” he explains. “What is it about this person that has become a part of me now that I’m going to carry forward?”

Thinking about that kind of responsibility left the Interrupters with a sense of obligation to make sure they are leading a life full of purpose because they get the opportunity to do so. And that meant reframing difficult experiences and heartbreaking loss into armor made of unbreakable steel.

“Isn’t pain just the gift of a lesson?” Allen asks with the kind of conviction that tells you her answer. “You can try to destroy me, but at the end of the day, all of that is just going to make me stronger. And the more you try and hurt me, the more I’m going to heal that brokenness. It’s about seeing the wounds, the battle scars, and knowing they humbled me. And in my humility, I have learned to find peace.”

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