* En anglais uniquement
An international punk supergroup,
Fake Names are four musicians with long and impressive resumés who came together to play music that's lean but full-bodied, melodic, and unpretentiously artful despite its velocity. The lineup includes former and current members of
Minor Threat,
Refused,
Bad Religion, Embrace,
Girls Against Boys, and
Dag Nasty, and began as an informal collaboration between two longtime friends before it grew into a proper band who issued their self-titled debut album in 2020.
Fake Names began when
Brian Baker and Michael Hampton, who had been friends since second grade, met at Hampton's home in Brooklyn in 2016 to exchange musical ideas and possibly write some songs.
Baker and Hampton also had a shared history as part of the Washington, D.C. punk and hardcore scene in its glory days.
Baker was guitarist with the legendary D.C. band
Minor Threat, and later went on to play with
the Meatmen,
Dag Nasty, and
Bad Religion. Hampton, meanwhile, cut his teeth playing in
S.O.A. with future
Black Flag vocalist
Henry Rollins, and would go on to work with Embrace and
One Last Wish. By the end of the day,
Baker and Hampton had decided to form a new band, and they reached out to
Johnny Temple, who had gone to the same elementary school with them and made a name for himself with Soulside and
Girls Against Boys.
Temple was game, and a few months later, both
Bad Religion and
Girls Against Boys were playing the Chicago punk rock festival Riot Fest, where
Baker and
Temple caught a set by Swedish punks
Refused. They felt
Refused vocalist
Dennis Lyxzén would be a good match for their new group, and
Lyxzén, a longtime fan of vintage D.C. punk, was happy to participate.
Baker, Hampton, and
Temple gathered in a studio in New York City to record demos of the new band's songs, with
Matt Schulz, a veteran of
Enon,
Holy Fuck, and
SAVAK, sitting in on drums. They then passed the tracks along to
Lyxzén, who wrote lyrics and recorded vocals in Sweden. In January 2019, the group, now known as
Fake Names, made their first public appearance, playing a show at New York's Union Pool with Hammered Skulls (a collaboration between
Mary Timony of
Helium and
Ex Hex and Alec MacKaye of Faith and
the Warmers). When
Brett Gurewitz, who plays in
Bad Religion with
Baker and runs the successful punk label Epitaph Records, heard the
Fake Names demo, he quickly made an offer to put it out as-is as their debut album, feeling it didn't need any additional work. The band agreed, and Epitaph brought out
Fake Names in May 2020. ~ Mark Deming