The Offspring: Smash : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

No amount of digital remastering can hide the fact that Smash was recorded entirely on the red end of the dial. The vocals and guitars still distort and crackle throughout, but the fuzz doesn't detract from the exuberance that drove the 1994 album to go platinum six times and become the best-selling independent-label album ever. That troika of inescapable mid-Nineties singles — "Gotta Get Away," "Self Esteem," and "Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)" — retains some of its bounce, but the real pleasures are in the songs that weren't pounded into dust on rock radio, like the breakneck "Nitro (Youth Energy)," the jaunt into ska on "What Happened to You?" with its cute little guitar solo, and the anti-conformity ode "Smash." The album remains a fun artifact from the year of Dookie, and even though the Offspring's output would later devolve into novelty songs and Rob Schneider samples, it's nice to be reminded there was a time when the band was capable of writing tight, no frills fist-pumpers that swept up a swarm of pimply eleven-year-olds.