X Smoke & Fiction LP

Analog Planet Rated 9/10 Music, 8/10 Sound!

Being great is one thing, but staying great for a long time is another. X has been great for 47 years, building their legend as one of America's most original punk bands with seven albums between 1980 and 1993. In 2024, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake release their final album together, Smoke & Fiction, alongside multiple national tours. Like Alphabetland (2020), Smoke & Fiction has the fury and fun expected from X. It's a valedictory lap with tracks like "Big Black X" reflecting back on their journey.

"X is a great band name; also a bad idea sometimes when it gets lost in print or on the marquee. Gotta have a sense of humor. We all did in the early days. Los Angeles was a carnival of weirdness back then, with left over traces of silent movie stars, long haired hippies, bikers, and brand new self-defined punks doing anything we wanted. When we started touring the country we found like-minded people everywhere, and somehow they all found us. Even if the X was lost on the old marquee." – Exene Cervenka

Four decades after the inception of X, one thing is clear: X was not only one of the most influential bands to crash out of the punk movement of the late '70s, but their music continues to be sonically groundbreaking. Songs written during the group's inception are as relevant and inventive today as they were in 1977.

The fact is, no one sounds like X and no one ever will.

The first two songs on the new disc are full-tilt punk stampedes with Doe's and Cervenka's beat-poet lyrics carried on the wave of Zoom's guitar and Bonebrake's drums. In the next few songs, however, the quartet's long-standing roots in rockabilly, folk-rock and British Invasion classicism surface through the staccato beats. It was that tension between pop-music history and punk-rock anti-history that made X the most interesting of the post-Ramones bands. That same push-and-pull makes Smoke & Fiction one of the year's best roots-rock albums.

X's Smoke & Fiction does the best possible thing for any artist/band — it excites you, and makes you want to listen to more of their music. I know that I, for one, will be playing my Smoke & Fiction LP again soon, and will also be digging back in to revisit the rest of the X catalog with refreshed open ears and open mind. You should too.