Celtic punks Flogging Molly, coming to Wind Creek, look to restore anarchy after pandemic

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Late last summer, seminal Celtic punk band Flogging Molly had finished "Anthem," its first new album in five years, and was racing to get it out.

COVID-19 restrictions finally were being lifted, and the band wanted to have new material for when it got back in front of the public again, singer Dave King said in a recent phone call from Austin, Texas, where the band that night kicked off a tour that stops Saturday, Feb. 25, at Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem.

• Flogging Molly will perform at 8 p.m. on Feb. 24 at Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem, with opening acts Anti-Flag and Skinny Lister
• General admission standing tickets, at $40 advance and $45 day of the show, are available at the Wind Creek website
• The band is touring to support its new album, 'Anthem' and a new EP, 'Til the Anarchy's Restored,' which is due out on March 10

"We wanted to make it a really short, snappy album kind of thing, because of all we’ve been through," King said. "It was written very quickly, it was recorded very quickly. So it was like back to old-school days, you know what I mean? And we just wanted to have a certain amount of songs on the album."

The result was "Anthem," an 11-song disc released in September.

But that hurried process left behind a great slower, more thoughtful song, "Til the Anarchy's Restored," which didn't make the album.

"Everybody was like, ‘Well why aren’t we putting this one on the album?’" King said. "And I was, like, ‘You know what? I think we should make something of it on its own.’"

So on March 10, in a nod by the Irish band to St. Patrick's Day, it will release a three-song EP with "Til the Anarchy's Restored" as the title cut and new versions of two songs from its 2002 sophomore album, "Drunken Lullabies," recorded live during the "Anthem" sessions.

“We decided this makes a little bit of sense for St. Patrick’s Day, maybe, to make a little EP of this, you know?" King said. "And so it just came about that way. Simple as that."

“We never have excess material. That’s one thing we never do," he said with a laugh.

Born out of COVID

King said “'Til the Anarchy's Restored" was born out of the disconnect people went through with the COVID-19 pandemic, and a desire to return to normal life.

"You talk to people about what we’ve all been through with the pandemic and things like that, and a lot of people were saying to me, ‘Well, we’re not gonna …’ Or I’d read about what people were saying, and they’re not going to mention the pandemic and what we’ve all been through," he said.

“But I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that at all. I think for me, personally, I sing about what I’m going through at the time of writing, and what I’m feeling and stuff like that.

“So that song was basically about feeling lost — everybody feeling lost. But at the end of the day," King says, quoting the new song's lyrics, "All it takes is one believer/Two together, and then we roll back into it."

"We start to come out of this, and we start to build again and to rebuild our lives and our societies and everything, you know? Coming to gigs — sharing stories and memories of these times. I think it’s very important. I mean, you just can’t pretend something didn’t happen.”

So the anarchy being restored is getting back to normal?

King laughs. “Yes, exactly. The anarchy is normality,” he said, laughing again.

A new album

King said the new album, "Anthem," came from pretty much the same angst.

Courtesy of Rise Records

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He said the band did a livestream performance on St. Patrick's Day 2021 from their hometown of Dublin, Ireland. "We were all together and I was feeling really itchy about going back and really getting out — cause I had a load of ideas during the time that we had off."

He said that immediately after pandemic travel bans were lifted, he and his wife Bridget Regan, Flogging Molly's female voice, left quarantine in Ireland.

"The minute we could get back to the States, we got on a plane, and we flew back to our house in Detroit," he said.

He said the band got together a few weeks later. "And we wrote the album in the basement of our house and then went on tour. And what we did was we would rehearse the songs during soundcheck every day."

To produce the album, King said the band tapped Steve Albini, with whom it had done its first two albums — 2000's "Swagger" and 2002's breakthrough "Drunken Lullabies," which put the band in the Top 10 on the U.S. Independent chart — and went to his Electric Audio recording studios in Chicago.

"We knew what we’d get," King said. "We knew … it was going to be our album because Steve is the type of person that records what you want. … It was like going back to the beginning, in a sense."

“I remember when we did our first two albums with Steve, the way they are arranged, the way they’re performed, is just the band. The way they’re written is just the band."

"And sometimes as years go by, you get people in, and they put their own two cents in. But we didn’t want that this time. We wanted just 100% Flogging Molly."

When the band started recording, "it was three, four takes and that was it. Minimal overdubs — and when I say minimal overdubs, we all played together."

“So it was like, almost, with the years of experience that we had, we wrote the album very quickly, recorded it very quickly. I don’t know if we could have done it if we weren’t together so long. But the fact that we have been, we knew what we wanted to do."

“After being off for so long, we certainly didn’t want to spend any more time getting it together.”

Many of the songs also are reflections on life during the coronavirus, King said. That was the case with the first single, "These Times Have Got Me Drinking."

“Well, that’s basically sitting with a drink in my hand, looking out the window during the pandemic," King said with a laugh. "Yeah! ‘These times have got me drinking,’ you know? And I just started her off like that, and we turned it into a rabble rouser, and, you know, kicked this thing in the face."

“And that’s basically what it was – it was just about, you know, getting out of this. It was all about getting out of what we were all going through. Having that hope — having the attitude of, ‘This is not gonna get us down.’”

New EP, the same spirit

In addition to the new "'Til the Anarchy's Restored," to flesh out the new EP, Flogging Molly re-recorded two songs from "Drunken Lullabies."

That disc's title track captures the band at full-bore runaway train speed. And “What’s Left of the Flag” has King singing with a slight rasp to his voice as if captured in the encore of a forceful concert.

Courtesy Rise Records

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But, in fact, both songs were recorded, live in the studio, with Albini in one take during the “Anthem” sessions.

King said working again with Albini also served to rekindle some of the band's original spirit.

As perhaps Celtic punk's founding band — the genre's other seminal act, Dropkick Murphys, was founded a year after Flogging Molly's 1995 start — Flogging Molly had its breakthrough with its third album, "Within a Mile of Home," which in 2004 hit No. 1 on Billboard's Independent chart.

It had its biggest success with its 2008 album "Float," which also topped the Independent chart and had the hit "Requiem for a Dying Song," which hit No. 35 on the Alternative Songs chart.

That now was 15 years ago.

“Going back to Steve’s to do the last album, for example, it was, like, ‘Jesus! Where did the years go?’" King said. "With the two years that we had off [for COVID], you do listen to a lot of the old stuff that you did."

“And you put it into context, and it’s like, ‘Wow! We did that? We did this?' It was like, for a band that started off in a little pub in the corner [of] a bar in Los Angeles, we’ve done a lot, you know?”

After more than 25 years together, King said, “I think we’re one of those bands — and I think that’s why we’ve been together so long and tour as much as we do — is that we really, really appreciate what we’ve gone through. We’ve been very lucky."

He said that when he sees new bands such as Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C., he thinks about "how difficult this is to do now."

"We’re also very appreciative of what we’ve gone through," he said. "I mean, we’re very lucky in the sense that we’ve had an unbelievable run."

“For a band that no record company would even look at, they wouldn’t know what to do with, let alone sell records and be touring 25 years later. It comes from [a] great belief from within the band."

He said that when Flogging Molly plays shows these days, "we have fans who used to come to see us on the Warped Tour, who now have kids. And they come with their parents. So you’ve got, like, so many different generations of people coming to our shows — families. It’s unbelievable."