A much-needed refresher in how to have fun: it’s the long-awaited return of chaotic punks FIDLAR.

The dumbest thing you could do is take FIDLAR too seriously. The Californian punks don’t do deep. They smoke toads, and argue over 90s pop culture. If it doesn’t crack them up, they’re keeping schtum.

Spending their afternoons sticking it to post-tour sickness, the trio of Zac Carper, Brandon Schwartzel, and Max Kuehn play it cool. Dusting off the cobwebs with comeback EP ‘That’s Life’, the trio say goodbye to founding member Elvis Kuehn and the mad scientist studio experiments of 2019’s ‘Almost Free’ and say hello to three chords and the truth.

Like snorting speed, the aggro-punk of comeback single ‘FSU’ is a giveaway for anyone guessing where they’re at after a global pandemic and four years away. We think? Zac claims it made the cut first because “that was the dumbest one, gotta set the palate right away”, but for Brandon, it was a way of kicking the door back open.

Being pissed off is punk-rock 101, but for FIDLAR, it was beginning to feel like they were the punchline to someone else’s joke. Starting with the pandemic slamming shut the doors to their tour bus for three years, it’s no surprise they’re dropping F-bombs in every line of ‘FSU’ like they’re leading the blitz.

FIDLAR aren’t a band built for difficult conversations. If a song doesn’t have them breaking their backs laughing, they’re throwing it in the trash. It’s an official rule, according to Zac. “If I don’t crack up, it’s not good; it’s gone.” Yet, as the world went back to normal, they had to have one with co-vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist Elvis Kuehn, who decided it was time to duck out.

“The conversation was like, we’re pretty ready to get going again, and he was like, ‘I’m not there, so go for it’. It was a bit of a shock, but we were all ready to move; we were all excited to book some shows, write some songs, and start the engine back up since we hadn’t been running in a while,” Brandon says matter-of-factly as the question falls to him, the others juggling it like a hot potato. “We were all on team move forward, and he was like, ‘I just can’t do it anymore; I want to do my own things’.”

When your co-vocalist calls time on your band, getting the engine back up and running is easier said than done. While their previous two albums tackled their turbulent journeys to getting sober, ‘That’s Life’ came from cracking up and falling back on old habits – only this time, it was like teaching old dogs new tricks.

Having spent 2020 caravanning with friends throughout the East and West Coasts, Mexico, and Hawaii, Zac culminated the chaos with a DMT ceremony spent in Lake Powell. The psychedelic trip is said to help you separate the gap between who you think you are and who you really are. But for Zac, smoking the toad was like finding his way back to FIDLAR.

“At that time, it was wobbling a bunch, I wasn’t doing anything with FIDLAR – it was this weird time where we didn’t know what we were doing, so I fucking smoked the toad, and it fucking shook my brain, dude, that shit changed my life,” smirks Zac, suddenly springing to life as his bandmates look on in silence. “I was sitting on a fuck tonne of songs, I didn’t stop writing, but a lot of them were just written on fucking ukulele and not really in the fucking thought process of being FIDLAR.

It’s as serious as the conversation gets, because when topics turn to the title of the EP, ‘That’s Life’, it’s back to being a band on the run. “Me and Max were just stoned in his studio, and he has a tattoo that says, ‘that’s life’, and it’s a skate video we all grew up watching.”

FIDLAR aren’t here to change the world; they’re here to wake, bake, and skate. The plan for FIDLAR 2.0 is there is no plan, kind of. “Just keep playing, keep writing music and putting shit out. It’s that simple,” says Brandon, as Zac drops the elevator pitch. “We write songs, we record them, and release them so people can come to shows and buy our t-shirts.”■