The Los Angeles punk elders Bad Religion have been going strong for 39 years now. In the early ’80s, they helped set the template for the muscular, melodic sound of Southern California skate-punk, which has largely remained intact through the decades. (Bad Religion broke that template once, too, when they experimented with synthy prog-punk on the 1983 album Into The Unknown. They basically disowned the album almost immediately, but it ruled.) Bad Religion were also largely responsible for the explosion of Cali-punk popularity in the ’90s, with Epitaph Records, the label founded by guitarist Brett Gurewitz, setting the dominant sound of the genre. And Bad Religion have never stopped cranking out righteous, furious, fast, catchy music. This year, they’ll release their 17th album of it.

This spring, Bad Religion will follow up 2013’s True North with the new LP Age Of Unreason. That’s a long time between albums, but they’ve recently been hitting us with one-offs like “The Kids Are Alt-Right” and “The Profane Rights Of Man,” the latter of which appears as a bonus track on the new album. As with those songs, Age Of Unreason finds Bad Religion responding to a desperately fucked political climate.

First single “Chaos From Within,” the album’s opening track, should give you a good idea what to expect here. Over the band’s classic thunder-gallop, frontman Greg Graffin declaims, “Threat is urgent, existential / With patience wearing thin / But the danger’s elemental / It’s chaos from within.” This is some total punch-the-air music. Below, listen to “Chaos Within,” check out the Age Of Unreason tracklist, and read what Graffin has to say about the new album.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Chaos From Within”
02 “My Sanity”
03 “Do The Paranoid Style”
04 “The Approach”
05 “Lose Your Head”
06 “End Of History”
07 “Age Of Unreason”
08 “Candidate”
09 “Faces Of Grief”
10 “Old Regime”
11 “Big Black Dog”
12 “Downfall”
13 “Since Now”
14 “What Tomorrow Brings”
15 “The Profane Rights of Man” (bonus)

Graffin says:

When I saw all these headlines about how terrible our world had become, I started doing a lot of reading. I read about the French revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and I started to recognize that this is a pattern of history and something we should never venture into. There are ample warnings against it. Every school child should know this but it’s hard to get people to read about these things. Maybe this album can help. Because right now, with social media, we are just playing a version of kill the guy with the ball.

Age Of Unreason is out 5/3 on Epitaph.