- Everything Sucks · 1996
- Hypercaffium Spazzinate (Deluxe Edition) · 2016
- Milo Goes to College · 1982
- I Don't Want to Grow Up · 1985
- Milo Goes to College · 1982
- Everything Sucks · 1996
- I Don't Want to Grow Up · 1985
- Suffrage - Single · 2020
- Milo Goes to College · 1982
- Suffrage - Single · 2020
- 9th & Walnut · 2021
- 9th & Walnut · 2021
- 9th & Walnut · 2021
Essential Albums
- 1986
- Following a brief hiatus while frontman Milo Aukerman attended university, the Descendents returned with I Don’t Want to Grow Up, a slam dunk that built on the sturdy melodies and unfettered nerdiness of their classic debut. Amusingly puerile wisecracks like "Pervert" and "No FB" justify the album’s title, but songs like “Silly Girl” and “Good Good Things” reveal the loneliness lurking behind Aukerman’s childish one-liners, making for an album that both pokes fun at and embraces maturity in the same dogged breath.
- All due respect to the Buzzcocks and the Ramones, but no single album had as profound an effect on the development of pop punk as Descendants’ 1982 classic Milo Goes to College. Formed in the late 1970s in the Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach by teenagers who bonded over coffee and fishing, the band members instantly seemed different from their more urbane peers. These guys were neither poets nor radicals nor nihilists—they were boy-next-door types whose sources of frustration were as old-fashioned and evergreen as a recent breakup (“Catalina”) or a conservative parent (“Suburban Home”). On Milo Goes to College, the humour was screwball (“I Wanna Be a Bear”), the values traditional (“Marriage”). And the album’s fantasies of eventually being seen as the Good Guy or White Knight touched on a rage that foreshadowed the more buttoned-up side of American hardcore (“Hope”). Milo Goes to College was punk, but the band members were self-described “square[s] going nowhere” (“I’m Not a Punk”). (As for the album’s title: Their singer, Milo Aukerman, really was getting ready to go to college, eventually earning a PhD in biology.) In the same way The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds captured the frustration of feeling like an adult but still being treated like a kid, Milo was a beacon to teenagers (and teens at heart) who were angry at the world, but found the conventions of rebellion—the drama, the operatic self-importance—silly and off-key. From here, you get the mix of toilet humour and genuine empathy that drove blink-182 and NOFX, and the mix of aggression and catchiness that inspired Green Day and My Chemical Romance (not to mention pretty much every major band to play the Warped Tour). Even the stuff that would (and should) bother modern listeners—most notably the homophobic slurs on “I’m Not a Loser”, or the way the semi-patronising romantic ode “Bikeage” comes off like an incel’s bedtime story—feels socially accurate in ways a lot of 1980s punk simply does not. And whether or not the members “get the girl” is beside the point—when she eventually takes her own life, they scream out their loneliness, and wonder what they could have done to save her, the way good boys do (“Jean Is Dead”).
- 2021
- 2004
- 1996
- 1989
- 1987
- 1987
Music Videos
- 2016
- 2016
- 1997
- 1997
Artist Playlists
- Sarcastic hardcore blasts and heart-on-sleeve punk hits from these SoCal icons.
- Their noisy punk echoed up and down the West Coast and beyond.
- Let Milo be your guide to the L.A. punks' giddy world.
Singles & EPs
- 2020
- 2018
- 2004
Live Albums
- 2001
- 1987
Compilations
- 1991
- 1988
- 1985
About Descendents
With their epochal 1982 debut, Milo Goes to College, melodic hardcore crew Descendents created a safe space for nerds in the mosh pit en route to becoming figureheads for future generations of pop-punk misfits.
- ORIGIN
- Manhattan Beach, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 1977
- GENRE
- Alternative