Photo Credit: Michelle Motta
New EP Sympathy for the Decibel Releases October 16, 2026
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Public Stream EP October 16, 2026
Watch the Video for “Sympathy for the Decibel”
Portland, Oregon punk ’n’ roll five-piece Guerrilla Teens return October 16 with Sympathy for the Decibel, a new EP on Sonic Jett Records and the latest chapter in a rock & roll story that stretches back through decades of West Coast noise. Frontman Scott “Deluxe” Drake and guitarist Jeff Fieldhouse first made their names with Long Beach garage-punk hellraisers The Humpers, whose gloriously unvarnished collision of punk, garage and old-fashioned rock & roll took them from Southern California bars to Epitaph Records and stages across the US and Europe. But Guerrilla Teens aren’t a reunion, and nostalgia only tells half the story. With Saul Koll on guitar, Tim Connolly on drums and Anna Andersen on bass, they’re a Portland band built from people who never really stopped doing this in the first place.
Guerrilla Teens’ story stretches back through some disappearing pieces of West Coast underground history, a few decades and a thousand miles south. Back in the ’90s, The Humpers could be found making an ungodly racket at Al’s Bar in downtown Los Angeles, the battered American Hotel watering hole that became a de facto town square for artists, punks, musicians and assorted downtown lifers. They came up through a world of Flipside Magazine, Sympathy for the Record Industry, Long Beach bars and cheap rooms where punk rock still existed largely because somebody was stubborn enough to keep putting it on. Drake and Fieldhouse were already writing together then, turning Little Richard and Chuck Berry propulsion, Stooges and New York Dolls abrasion and their own particular Southern California damage into songs that were fast, loud and difficult to mistake for anybody else.
A lot can happen between there and Portland. Clubs close, magazines disappear, bands break up and splinter into other bands, and neighbourhoods get redeveloped as people scatter. Follow the I-5 north long enough, though, and eventually the concrete and California sun give way to low clouds, wet bridges and coastal Douglas firs. Portland has become home to its own strange congregation of punk lifers, younger bands, record obsessives and California exiles, a city where the pours are still heavy and the lights are low, and nobody particularly cares how old you are if the band is good. That’s the world Guerrilla Teens inhabit. Drake and Fieldhouse passed through Suicide Kings, The Humpers, The Lovesores and other incarnations before lockdown put them back in songwriting mode with nowhere particularly useful to go. What began as the possibility of an EP quickly became another band. Koll brought history with The Lovesores, 8-Foot Tender and his own long trail through Portland rock & roll, while Connolly and Andersen brought another branch of the city’s punk family through bands including The Epoxies and The Suicide Notes. Five people with enough old flyers, dead bands and questionable decisions between them to fill a storage locker, starting over because apparently the alternative was not starting over.
That history matters, but Guerrilla Teens have spent the years since making sure it doesn’t become the whole point. Their records have steadily carved out a personality distinct from The Humpers and The Lovesores, pulling raw ’70s punk and garage rock into darker melodies, twin-guitar attack, stronger pop hooks and Andersen’s backing vocals. Drake has never been particularly interested in policing the borders around punk anyway. Genres change names every decade. To him, it’s all rock & roll. More importantly, he still believes it can be smart, strange and mysterious without losing the part that makes somebody want to knock over a beer. That stubbornness runs straight through the Drake/Fieldhouse partnership. They have been writing songs together, on and off, for decades, and Drake still calls Fieldhouse his favourite songwriting partner. There’s something beautifully unreasonable about that. After all the bands, records and miles between Long Beach and Portland, they’re still finding reasons to plug in together and write another one.
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Sympathy for the Decibel follows 2023’s Under the Dagger and 2025’s The Monkey’s Paw, records that pushed Guerrilla Teens further into their own corner of the underground. The response has been fittingly loud and occasionally argumentative, with writers hearing everything from furious twin guitars and darker ’60s atmosphere to the old collision of punk attack and timeless rock & roll. Onstage, they’ve shared bills with Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, The Lords of Altamont and The Briefs, adding another stack of shows to résumés that were already plenty long. And really, that’s how this kind of music has always survived: somebody keeps making records, somebody keeps booking the room, and somebody else still bothers to show up. Punk gets declared dead for roughly the thousandth time. Guerrilla Teens seem to have missed the announcement. Decades after Drake and Fieldhouse first started writing together, nobody here appears particularly interested in polishing the old stories or rebuilding what came before. There are still songs to write, rooms to play and another record waiting to be turned up too loud. Their sympathies, after all, lie with the decibel.
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