Cosmic Joke has just dropped a covers EP to help raise funds for victims of the fires in their hometown of Los Angeles.
Welcome to L.A. finds the band covering SoCal-related classics from Bad Religion, Adolescents, X, and Agent Orange. The EP features guest vocal appearances by Colin Young (Twitching Tongues, God's Hate), Marisa Shirar (fleshwater), Sara G (Entry, Lockslip), and Sammy Ciaramitaro (DRAIN, Gulch).
Welcome to L.A. landed on my radar over the weekend after Cosmic Joke texted me about it. "It was [guitarist] Morgan [Miller] and my idea," vocalist Mac Miller texted me.
"We were gonna do a live session, an Audiotree-style kind of thing and pivoted after the fires. We thought it would be a fun exercise and positive use of the time and energy. We tracked it all January 31st, live at The Pit and had our friends send in their guest spots via email."
Mac educated me on the benefit angle of Welcome to L.A. "It's only on Bandcamp for the first couple weeks so all initial income can be donated before we then add it to streaming platforms.
"It's not for any specific organization, we’re going to send all money directly to people who lost property and had underfunded GoFundMe’s. Lots of families without social media followings who didn’t have their page spread as easily as others."
I asked Mac how tough was it to select the songs to cover on the EP. "It was pretty easy. We wanted to represent that era of SoCal hardcore that I feel is lost on a lot of younger kids in 2025. We’d already been playing [Agent Orange's] 'Bloodstains' live and we all knew [Bad Religion's] 'We’re Only Gonna Die' already so that was easy.
"We’d talked about covering [X's] 'Los Angeles' for the last year and [Adolescents'] 'L.A. Girl' just felt most appropriate for us, Adolescents is our favorite band of that time that isn’t name checked as frequently. There were some other contenders but it all came together pretty quickly."
While I had his attention, I nudged Mac for Cosmic Joke's plans for the year. "There will be more new (original) music this spring!," the vocalist wrote.
"We have Texas and California shows in March, Vegas, and the Midwest in May (and again in July) and we will be hitting the Northeast for our first time early in August. We're still just doing as much as we can when we can!"
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Welcome to L.A. is available now.
Tagged: cosmic joke
