“Super Rad” by The Aquabats

"Super Rad!" comes off The Fury of the Aquabats!, the band's 1997 album, and it was the first Aquabats single to get real distribution, put out through Goldenvoice and Time Bomb Recordings, their labels at the time. Christian Richard Jacobs and Chad Larson wrote it. It's ska the way the Aquabats played it back then, a melody driven hard by the horns with the surfy lead guitar lines that ran through much of their early material, and reviewers heard the words as a kind of mission statement for the band's superhero act.

It never charted, and that hardly mattered. College radio and stations like KROQ in Los Angeles leaned on it hard during the brief American ska revival of the late '90s, giving the band their first taste of something like mainstream exposure. AbsolutePunk credited it, more or less on its own, with putting them on the map.

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