…And Out Come the Wolves by Rancid

...And Out Come the Wolves, Rancid's third album, hit the streets on Epitaph on August 22, 1995, and the title is a wisecrack at the majors' expense. Catchy songs and a growing crowd had set off a label bidding war over the band, and Rancid ended it by staying right where they were. The name comes from a poem in Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries.

Jerry Finn produced, and he let the songs come out fast, loud and loaded with hooks. Tim Armstrong, Matt Freeman and Lars Frederiksen play punk with ska running through its veins, the skanking upstrokes and rubbery bass a reminder of Armstrong and Freeman's days in Operation Ivy. "Roots Radicals", "Time Bomb" and "Ruby Soho" were the singles, all three landed on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and they got the band more MTV and radio play than ever before, "Ruby Soho" with a shout-along chorus built for the pit and "Time Bomb" bouncing on an old-school ska beat.

It went gold in January 1996 and platinum in 2004. Alongside Dookie, Smash and Bad Religion's Stranger than Fiction, it helped drag punk rock back into the mainstream in the mid-'90s, and unlike a lot of the bands caught up in that boom, Rancid held on to the fans who'd been there first. For its 20th anniversary they played the whole album live on the Honor Is All We Know tour.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.