Ben Stiller’s Punk Band Has Reunited, and They’re Still Really Good

Back in July, we covered the news that Capital Punishment, the New York-based post-punk band in which a teenage Ben Stiller played drums, were planning to re-release their debut album, Roadkill, on Captured Tracks in September. They did indeed do that, and you can listen to the whole brilliantly odd, wild, Devo-indebted thing via your streaming service of choice right now. But things didn’t stop with that unlikely reissue. The whole band—Stiller, documentarian Kriss Roebling, Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Peter Swann, and UCL Slavic Studies Professor Peter Zusi—have recently reunited for a new EP called This Is Capital Punishment. It’s out on Record Store day, and you can listen to the record’s first single, a remake of Roadkill’s “Confusion,” below.

According to a press release, the record came about after Mike Sniper, head of Captured Tracks, asked Roebling for some extra material to add to the Roadkill Reissue. They all got back together to remake “Confusion,” and things worked out so well that they decided to stick with it and write some new stuff. Scattered around the world, they never made it back into a studio together after that first session—”Nobody recorded simultaneously with anyone else except me,” Roebling says—but they managed to get enough for their first new release in 35 years.

The new version of “Confusion” is tighter and heavier than the original, held down by Stiller’s driving beat and, I guess, the fact that these people all do important jobs now and don’t have time to be wilfully obtuse anymore. This Is Capital Punishment is out on November 23 via Captured Tracks.

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