“Robot Remnants” is 28 years old on paper and brand new on record. Patrick Jones wrote both the song and the lyrics nearly three decades ago, and the version on their new album, “Rats“, is its first recording. The Los Angeles punk band are still here in white shirts, ties, helmets and backpacks, still trying to “Rock Out Correctly“, and still describing themselves as people who pop in and out of the city’s punk scene whenever they can.
None of the five members are Mormon. The missionary look has been the band’s visual trademark for years, and Patrick has long tied it to dedication, sacrifice and obsession in artists.
“We don the image of Mormon missionaries symbolizing the dedication, sacrifice, and obsession common in most artists. The musician is as fanatical as any religious zealot bent on achieving his or her own individual purpose…Our generic uniforms – helmets, white shirts, ties and backpacks – act as a fashion-neutralizer and a ‘fuck-you’ to the fashion show that conceals the mediocrity that is most mainstream music today. Our mission is simple – TO ROCK OUT CORRECTLY. If you leave with a feeling of excitement and enjoyment, then our purpose is validated.”
For Patrick, “Rock Out Correctly” was never a joke. It has always been the ideal.
“‘Rock Out Correctly’ was always the ideal we strive for, it has never been a joke or anything like that. We feel that ‘Rocking Out Correctly’ involves many things about playing in a live rock band, it could be anything from setting up and breaking down our equipment quickly and efficiently to making eye contact with the audience, being polite etc. we donโt Always ‘Rock Out Correctly’ but we certainly try our best to do so.”
Patrick’s version is basically: set up and break down efficiently, make eye contact, be polite. After nearly 30 years, their code still comes down to knowing how to function as a band in a room full of other people. The live side has always been physical too, with Patrick known for treating his own safety as a fairly loose concern on stage.
For years, Mr. T’s Bowl in Highland Park was their home base. Patrick points to what happened there as the biggest change The Mormons have seen across their time in Los Angeles.
“I think the biggest change we experienced as band was what Happened with Mr.Tโs Bowl in Highland Park and the Highland Park/Eagle Rock area in general. Mr.Tโs bowl was our home base for years, a dive bar that hosted punk rock and other outsider music. As the Highland Park area was gentrified about 10 or 20 years ago, Mr. Tโs was bought by a big development company and totally erased from existence. As far as where The Mormons fit into the punk scene of 2026, itโs hard to say. The LA punk scene is pretty fractured, itโs more like a bunch of clicks if anything. The Mormons have always existed on the outskirts of the LA scene, popping in and out when and where we can.”
The missionary clothes make The Mormons instantly recognisable. The band are also getting called “Devo–core” in 2026, and Patrick sees little difference between an identity chosen by the band and one handed to them by somebody else.
“I donโt see a huge difference in being assigned an identity or choosing one. I think identity is an abstract concept anyway, that was probably one of the reasons why I chose The Mormons theme. I like the idea of presenting as something recognizable but making up a new identity around it.”
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Patrick also made the artwork for “Rats”, with Daniel Guzman shooting the band photos. The current five-piece has Patrick on vocals, Vince O’Campo on lead guitar, Peter Tintle on rhythm guitar, Johnny Ramirez on bass and Tim Neumann on drums.
“Rats” runs 29 minutes across ten tracks and comes out through Mild Chaos Records on 25 September 2026.
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The album starts with the mutant-rat little ditty “Rats: Night of Terror”, pulling its plot from the Italian horror and ratsploitation film of the same name. A post-apocalyptic gang of creeps wanders into an abandoned underground base, finds a nest of mutant rats and has its ongoing search for food and sex interrupted in fairly obvious fashion. The mutant-rat story sits first on a record that keeps returning to death, waste, bodies and bad technology.
“Hair and Teeth” goes straight at death and decay. Its first verse imagines technology stretching a person’s life and consciousness past their normal limits. The second accepts physical death and leaves whatever may come after it unresolved. That body-versus-consciousness problem keeps turning up across “Rats”, sometimes with a human body involved and sometimes with machinery taking its place.
Patrick says recurring ideas are simply part of how he writes.
“I wrote the lyrics for Robot Remnants 28 years ago so yes there are definitely reoccurring themes in the lyrics I write, I think that is true for most writers or creators or whatever. Artists tend to work through a lens of sorts to get their point across. I also wrote a song about cats!”
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“Psychotronic Adult Diapers” goes after the need to label everything, questions whether those labels hold up, and asks who, or what, keeps pushing people to put the world into boxes. Then it runs the whole thought through a bodily gag: “Groupthink is running down your leg so strap on your P.A.D.!”
“Walk-In Dumpster” gets stranger. A walk-in, in the song’s terms, is a human soul that can transfer into another body. Here the destination is a dumpster. The track takes the idea into a post-organic future where human consciousness can move into an inanimate object and, somehow, that transfer might be useful to people. Patrick genuinely thinks dumpsters deserve some respect.
“Pixelate Me” takes physical relocation into an arcade game from the 1980s. The song is a ballad, with the “Bishop of Battle” segment from the 1983 horror anthology “Nightmares” as the reference point. Bodies, screens and consciousness keep swapping places.
“Assholes and E-Waste” is the e-waste rocker, moving into right to repair, smartphone zombies and dead devices sitting under aluminosilicate glass with the undead shambling through the streets. It stays observational: “This is not a condemnation of our โSo connected we are have become disconnectedโ present day, just an observation.”
Patrick owns about five CRT televisions and points out that their value keeps climbing.
“Unreliable Nerve Endings” is a lament that takes distrust deeper into the body. The song asks how anyone can sort reality from fiction if the biology doing the sorting is itself unreliable, all the way down to the neurons. Its last line turns the problem into a neat horror reference: “The unreliable narrator is the new flesh!”
Then “Couch Gargoyles” gives Patrick his cat song. It is a roundelay built around the stranger questions people ask about cats: whether they steal your breath at night, what they stare at when nothing seems to be there, whether they can see the dead, and whether parasites associated with cats can alter human behaviour enough to make people want to feed them. The song goes looking for answers to all of them.
“Robot Remnants” is the dirge with the 28-year history. A long-deactivated humanoid robot has a restless ghost, or something close to one. Its disembodied program hangs around a dark corner of a science lab looking for revenge. Both the song and its lyrics were written 28 years ago. No earlier recording exists. “Rats” contains its first recorded version, from sessions engineered, mixed and mastered by Tucker Robinson.
The album closes with “They Watch”, a fight song built on the premise that ghosts and UAPs exist and that disembodied glassy eyes are watching. The watchers might be alien, human, supernatural or something nobody has a useful name for. Put beside “Unreliable Nerve Endings”, one song accepts strange observers as real and the other doubts the biological machinery used to decide what reality even is.
“You can definitely get to that conclusion comparing those 2 songs. If it was done deliberately itโs hard to say, subconsciously maybe. I do believe contradiction is at the base of perception, all I do know is that we really donโt know anything.”
Mr. T’s Bowl is gone. “Robot Remnants” spent 28 years without a recording. Patrick has around five CRT televisions and watches their value rise. In “Walk–In Dumpster“, even the rubbish container gets a soul.
“I donโt feel like any of the things you mentioned here are cheap or disposable. I love old horror films and the idea of a dead sentient robot fascinates me obviously. Dumpsters serve a great purpose and should be celebrated! I also am a big fan of CRT televisions, I currently own about 5 of them and they continue to go up in value. Just because something is old and forgotten doesnโt mean it no longer has any worth, I think itโs quite the opposite.”
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