Bad Religion's Jay Bentley on Smartphones & Divided Times

0:00It's April 26th. This is Music News Today. Music coverage powered by AI. Bad religion bassist Jay Bentley just opened up about how rough things feel right now. He said straight up he'd skip making another album if the world wasn't in such a mess. For him, the art comes from the pain, but he traded all for better times. He pins a lot of the blame on smartphones. Jay sees them as the big shift, causing ideological backslide, letting anyone spread lies and lead folks astray like zombies. It's keeping him up at night, wondering what flipped the switch. The band formed back in 1980 in Los Angeles suburbs, hitting their 45th anniversary last year. They've always been punk rock thinkers, pushing boundaries with smart lyrics on authority and society, evolving from local kids to global voices, asking what unites us all as humans. Their last studio album, Age of Unreason, dropped in 2019, tackling conspiracies, politics, and middle-class struggles with that classic, fast punk sound and humanist edge.

1:04Then in 2020, they marked 40 years with a live streaming event at the Roxy and dropped an autobiography full of stories from their garage, days to worldwide tours, that shared human threads still drives them, reminding us no matter where you're waking up, from Dubai to Berlin, we've got more in common than divides. Us. Bad religion keeps provoking thought in these divided days.