For a band of fiftysomething men playing the same sort of snotty, goofball punk rock they mastered in their teens, the creative process is inherently a look into the past, but the Descendents have taken that notion and embraced it in new ways on their 2021 album, 9th and Walnut. In 2002, vocalist Milo Aukerman and drummer Bill Stevenson invited original Descendents members Frank Navetta (guitar) and Tony Lombardo (bass), by that point long out of the group, to come into the studio and record a set of songs from the band's earliest days that had never previously made it onto an album. The idea was to put them on tape just the way they used to play them, without any effort to fancy them up, and while the project went incomplete at the time, in 2020, Aukerman and Stevenson dusted off the tracks, added new lead vocals from Aukerman, and the result is 9th and Walnut, named for the garage where they practiced in their scuffling days. The unfortunate contradiction in this music is that it's the sound of a great punk band re-creating the sound of the days when they were still learning how to get good at this stuff; the Descendents had already moved past this level of skill by the time they cut Milo Goes to College in 1982. Although the playing is probably better than it was when they were in high school, the arrangements are just as rudimentary, and, more importantly, the songs are as simplistic as they were back then. That's not to say this music is bad, since it isn't, but it's also the sound of the Descendents before they became the group we love today. While this is a loving tribute to Frank Navetta (who died in 2008), if you were hoping for more of the subtle but genuine forward growth the band has shown on later-day albums like Cool to Be You and Hypercaffium Spazzinate, what you get instead is a journey into the past, with all the good and bad that phrase implies.