Bad Vacation are a five-piece punk band out of New York City, and their new EP “Life Goes On” just landed. Four tracks of 80s hardcore crossed with rock and roll, punk rock and lyrical rap, run through a 90s and early 2000s filter. The stuff hits hard and moves fast — built for small rooms, close quarters, and sweat on the ceiling.
The band has shared stages with Enjoy, Slater, Upchuck, The Exploited, and The Zero Boys, and picked up coverage from Punk Magazine, Dirty Mag, and Drøme along the way. Their reference points — The Misfits, The New York Dolls, The Zero Boys — sit somewhere between the theatrical and the feral, which tracks. Bad Vacation don’t sound polished, and that’s clearly the point.
“Life Goes On” uses New York as weight. The band say NYC is “all over the EP, not as a postcard, but as pressure. Routine. Exhaustion. Repetition. Anger. Nostalgia.” Years spent in the city, heartbreak, losing friends, watching people drift — that’s what the songs are processing.
“That is why fast and raw still makes sense,” they explain. “The city is fast and raw. If you play clean and polite, it feels like a lie.”
There’s a directness to how they talk about what they do that matches the music. Punk, for them, is not just a sound.
“It is survival. If all we did was work two jobs and go home and do nothing, it would crush us. Punk is the outlet, mental, emotional, sometimes physical too. It is free therapy with the volume turned up, a way to dump the weight of the week and still feel human at the end of it.”
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That mentality feeds straight into how they approach shows. The band say they’d rather have twenty people losing it than two hundred staring.
“When it is real, it is not content, it is a gathering. We try to make our shows feel like that, like a family hang where everyone is welcome and nobody has to act cool. People dance, sweat, and actually connect. What feels hollow is anything that turns it into a transaction, where the room is full but the spirit is gone.”
They’re vocal about what keeps the NYC scene functioning — and what drains it.
“For bands like us, non-mainstream, you do not get to float above the scene and expect it to care. You have to show up. You have to be at shows. You have to be part of the room, so when you get on stage it is not strangers watching strangers. It is the homies watching the homies play and self-express.”
Venues like TV Eye, Gold Sounds, and Home Sweet Home get a nod, alongside smaller DIY spots that come and go. The alive rooms, they say, are the ones where even a small crowd can make it feel like a riot. The dead feeling? “Gatekeeping and control, when it is all rules and no spirit, when you feel like you are just filling a slot.”
Bad Vacation also push back against uniform lineups. Mixed bills feel natural to them — they don’t want a night where every band sounds the same. “That is not real life. People listen to everything, and the scene is healthier when different sounds collide.”
Sometimes it’s messy, sometimes the room is split, but they’d take that over playing in a closed loop. “You meet the best people on weird bills.”
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The broader picture, as they see it, is a scene that’s fragmented but not finished. Fewer new venues are becoming the spot, so everyone competes for the same rooms. Getting on a bill isn’t the hard part — building momentum without the community piece is. “The scene can feel fragmented, but it is not dead. It is a bunch of small worlds happening at once. The bands who move forward are the ones who stay present and keep showing up.”
“Life Goes On” is streaming now on most of the streamimng platforms. Bandcamp is hpsting their previous works, too:
