Photo: Dave Steckert
New York City has changed a lot in the 17 years since D Generation released their last album, 1999’s Through the Darkness. We are a few buildings short in the financial district, the bars aren’t filled with clouds of smoke anymore, and we’re no longer allowed to be served soft drinks in ten-gallon buckets.
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St. Mark’s Place, the Lower East Side street that once served as a hangout for punks and artists, is virtually unrecognizable nowadays. Mondo Kim’s, the record store where you could pick up a DGen LP (and maybe get shit about it from the snobby clerk), has been replaced by a karaoke bar where frat boy assholes go to be drunk and obnoxious. There’s a Chipotle right next to the spot that used to be Coney Island High, the legendary venue opened by frontman Jesse Malin where the band played their final show before taking a long hiatus. Hell, the entire street where you could once find the band members hanging around on most nights now looks like one long Pinkberry.
But to close your eyes and listen to “Apocalypse Kids,” a song from D Generation’s new album, Nothing Is Anywhere, you’d swear you were standing on the street when it still had soul. The often overlooked quintessential New York band stuck to the lo-fi sound they built a name for themselves on this, their fourth album, and the result is something that feels like a product of NYC’s glory days.
Guitarist Danny Sage describes “Apocalypse Kids” as autobiographical about the band, and about the current state of NYC, as its chorus describes them as “the sons of post-modern miracles, lost to the days of digital.” Says Malin: “We didn’t make this record for the happy-faced, ‘I like everything,’ disposable, digital, dickless masses.”
Nothing Is Anywhere is out on July 29 from Bastard Basement Records. Listen to “Apocalypse Kids” below.
