Review: Shards of fine punk in Rancid’s ‘Honor Is All We Know’

They’ve been Bay Area gutter punks, unlikely mainstream rock stars, reggae-revival champions and L.A. pop producers. Now the four guys in Rancid are back where they started — making three-minute shards of scuzzy but ultimately warm-hearted punk rock.

“Honor Is All We Know” comes six years after their last LP but sounds akin to the rough-and-ready albums from their mid-’90s rise. A trio of singles, “Collision Course,” “Honor Is All We Know” and “Evil’s My Friend,” were released as a single music video, and it ably captures the small nuances that set them apart as a band — artfully written pop choruses, melodic rockabilly lead lines and Tim Armstrong’s inimitably slurry vocals.

Epitaph Records owner (and co-founder of Bad Religion) Brett Gurewitz returns to the producer’s seat for this one, wringing a thrashy but precise performance out of the well-seasoned quartet. Let’s hope the current punk-rock revival is self-aware enough to acknowledge that Rancid was — and remains — one of the genre’s most influential acts.

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Rancid

“Honor Is All We Know”

Epitaph/Hellcat

Two and a half stars (out of four)