DEK

Most people probably wouldn’t expect much from an album called Boner, but it turns out that this record isn’t as bad as its title. Though the members of DEK, which stands for Don’t Even Know, are young — only 14 and 15 years old — they play their instruments and write songs that don’t all sound exactly the same. These four boys from Seattle have a wide range of influences that dips into just about every era and type of punk to date. Though they’ve cited inspiration from a lot of the more traditional punk bands like the Damned and the Dickies, along with more mainstream bands like Rancid and Nirvana, when they name drop the Casualties in one of their songs, things start making a little more sense. Out of all their influences, DEK’s sound lies closer to the Oi vein, although DEK still have a lot of forties to drink and cigarettes to smoke to catch up to anything like the Casualties. So while some hard living might still be required to achieve the sound they seem to be going for, DEK, at the moment, are making some pretty good, high-energy punk rock. And even though they haven’t hit legal drinking age yet, they sound just as together and competent as any other band that has.