It’s an exciting time for the Schizophonics.
The San Diego rock band has a lot on its plate right now, including a new album, “Burning Floor,” out this week. The album is not only the first for the group in four years, it’s the first for them on a new label.
The band’s also currently in the middle of a month-long, headlining North American tour in support of “Burning Floor,” their first full release since 2022’s “Hoof It.”
The album, which is led by the singles “Black Pleather” and “Sweat and Blood,” is the trio’s first for Alternative Tentacles, the San Francisco-area based indie label owned and operated by Jello Biafra, former lead vocalist for the legendary punk band Dead Kennedys. That band is best known for its 1979 debut single, “California Über Alles.”
Schizophonics singer and lead guitarist Pat Beers said his band first met Biafra while playing the annual Tiki Oasis event at a Mission Valley hotel. They then struck up an acquaintance with him.
“He would come see us when we played in San Francisco. He was always a big champion of the band,” Beers said. “He always wanted to help us out wherever he could.”
“And when we reached out to him wanting to put this (album) out, he was stoked to do it,” he added. “And it’s been great. The whole label, they’ve been a huge help and he’s been awesome; he’s just such a cool guy.”
As their name implies, the Schizophonics are a dynamic, high-energy garage rock band, both on their songs and at their live shows. Beers, their super-charged frontman, is known for his manic stage performances.
So, it was a little surprising when Beers recently said that when growing up in Arizona, he wasn’t a fan of rock music. At least, not initially.
“When I was a kid, I loved oldies,” he told Times of San Diego during a recent interview between tour stops. “Every state had their cool oldies station and they played Motown and all that kind of stuff. I loved old ‘60s and ‘50s and ‘70s pop oldies from that station.”
He also revealed that was a country music fan as a youngster.
“I kind of grew up around agriculture and 4-H and all that stuff. So I listened to a lot of early ‘90s country. I really like country from that era, honestly,” he remarked. “When I was a kid, it was like Garth Brooks and Dwight Yoakam and stuff like that. And I still have a soft spot for those songs.”
It wasn’t until he was a teen, he said, that he got into hard rock.
“I became a teenager and I heard Jimi Hendrix,” Beers explained. “My sister had a cassette tape of ‘Are You Experienced?’ by Hendrix and all of a sudden, it just clicked with me and I was like, ‘this is coolest thing I’ve ever heard.’
“And Hendrix is still kind of the top of the peak for me.”
In 2009, he and his now-wife, drummer Lety Beers, formed the Schizophonics and eventually moved to San Diego to further their careers. The group now includes bassist Sarah Linton, who’s from Encinitas and has been in the band for about three years.
Beers said that the trio’s new album, which clocks in at an efficient 10 songs and around 35 minutes, was very simple and easy to record. They already had a lot of practice performing the songs live.
“It was really, really, really quick,” he said of the recording process. “We were touring in Europe and we booked some studio time for the day that we got home. So we landed in San Diego and went to sleep that night and the next morning went to the studio. And we’d been playing the songs every day on tour, so we just went to the studio and we pretty much played live and recorded the bare bones of it in a day or two and then did extra overdubs and stuff over the course of a week.
“And then we mixed it pretty immediately after that, mixed and mastered (it) the next week. It’s the fastest we’ve ever done a record. We’d been playing the songs every day, so we kind of tried to capture the live feel.”
“We were so jetlagged, I barely remember making it now,” he added.
Beers said that although the album’s out on streaming platforms as of Wednesday, the vinyl version won’t be available in stores until Dec. 12. However, the band will have physical copies for sale after most of the tour’s October shows.
The tour, which kicked off Sept. 17, wraps up Oct. 22. It includes stops in Toronto and Montreal as well as many major American cities, such as Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Nashville, Dallas and Phoenix.
Unfortunately, no San Diego stops are included; the closest location is the tour closer, Oct. 22 in Los Angeles. But Beers said the band has tentative plans to play in America’s Finest City early next year.
“I think we’re gonna do two nights at the Casbah at the end of January. I wanna try to get some of the bands that we’ve been touring with to come out,” he said. “I wanna get them out there for that show and some other San Diego bands that we love, and just kind of make it a two-day big extravaganza.”
