Bad Cop Bad Cop from Long Beach, CA

Unapologetically personal best describes Lighten Up. In the final moments of “Dead Friends,” the penultimate track of the new Lighten Up, Bad Cop Bad Cop guitarist-vocalist Stacey Dee sings, “So try to love your life, while you can.” These words serve as a powerful thesis for Lighten Up (Fat Wreck Chords/Hopeless Records, September 19, 2025), the SoCal punk group’s fourth full-length. The album paints a striking portrait of life’s hard-won victories and hard-fought losses.

“I think that’s what I write my songs about,” Dee says. “Life is hard, but it's still beautiful. Stop picking the hard shit to look at—look at the beautiful stuff too. Lighten up.”

Dee and her bandmates—bassist-vocalist Linh Le, drummer-vocalist Myra Gallarza, and new guitarist Alex Windsor—know what it takes to persevere. Resilience surfaces throughout Lighten Up. In “Strugglinh,” Le confronts self-doubt and finds strength, and in “See Me Now,” she turns family loss into triumph. “Straight Out of Detox” details a transformational night in Dee’s life, and “Note to Self” is her reminder to keep things in perspective, aided by iconic LA underground rapper 2mex.

“This was the first time that I dug in to tell stories that I was too afraid to talk about prior,” Dee says. “We've made records that were unapologetically strong, but the way we got to be unapologetically strong was dealing with things like this.”