Punk Rock Starts Keeping Its Own Records

Today, we cover:

1. NOFX's warts-and-all documentary, the short version. Forty years of a band that built a career on refusing to be taken seriously gets a feature film that doesn't take it easy on them either.
2. Joan Jett's debut, remastered, the short version. The solo record every major label rejected in 1981 returns for its 45th anniversary, original collaborators and all.
3. A regional Irish scene's reunion documentary, the short version. Four Cavan teenagers who tried to be The Damned in the 1980s, and got nowhere, get a film about it anyway.

Punk's founding claim was that none of this was supposed to matter later. No major labels, no critics' approval, no institutional memory — just a scene built to burn fast and not ask permission. Three separate 2026 releases suggest that claim didn't hold. What's notable isn't that the 1980s and '90s punk scene is being revisited; nostalgia cycles do that to every genre eventually. It's who's doing the revisiting: not historians or studios working from the outside, but the people who were actually there, now acting as their own archivists.

The band that never apologized

NOFX formed in Los Angeles in 1983 and spent forty years refusing to fit anywhere — too sarcastic for punk's purists, too strange for mainstream rock radio, never signed to a major label because no one who mattered particularly wanted them. "40 Years of Fuckin' Up," directed by James Buddy Day, premiered at SXSW in March and gets a wider theatrical release on August 23 and 26. Fat Mike, Eric Melvin, El Hefe, and Erik Sandin all sat for it, which is its own small admission: a band whose entire identity ran on not being earnest agreed to be filmed being earnest, at least for ninety minutes, about how they built a fanbase without ever needing anyone's approval to do it.

A record no one asked for, in 1981

Joan Jett's case runs the same logic in reverse. Her solo debut, "Bad Reputation," exists because every major label she approached in 1981 turned it down — so she and producer Kenny Laguna pressed it themselves on Blackheart Records, an indie label built for exactly this problem. The album that became the reason no one questions her judgment again just got a 45th-anniversary reissue, dated July 31, with new artwork and guest musicians pulled from the Sex Pistols and Blondie — the same scene, checking back in on the record the industry didn't want.

The place documentaries don't usually go

"Once We Were Punks" is the smallest and least commercial of the three, which is what makes it the clearest version of the pattern. Director Frank Shouldice's film follows four teenagers from Bailieboro, a small town in County Cavan, who formed a postpunk band called Panic Merchants in the 1980s and got nowhere — no deal, no scene beyond their own, nothing to show for it except, twenty-five years later, a reunion as Sons of Southern Ulster and a reunion gig at a Dublin venue. It won the Audience Award at the IFI Documentary Festival anyway. Punk's most local, least mythologized corners are getting the same treatment as its most famous ones.

Nobody involved in these three projects needed to make them. That's the point.