Hunx and His Punx are a California band featuring Seth Bogart, Shannon Shaw, and Erin Emslie. When the group reunited in 2019 after a five-year hiatus, it felt like a long-delayed teenage dream finally coming true. What began as a celebratory return quickly turned into a whirlwind: playing John Waters’ birthday party, touring with Bikini Kill, opening for The B-52s at one of their favorite festivals, and beginning work on their first album since 2013. None of them could have predicted that finishing the record would take five years, or that the process would be shaped by a series of devastating events, a tragic death, the global pandemic, and displacement caused by one of the worst wildfires in California history.Formed in the late 2000s, Hunx and His Punx released three albums between 2010 and 2013: Gay Singles, Too Young To Be in Love, and Street Punk, via Hardly Art and True Panther Sounds. The band quickly became beloved fixtures of the queer core