Punk bands don’t come much more legendary than the Descendents.

After a career spanning four decades the band has decided – literally – to go back to where it all began, finally recording some of their earliest material and assembling it into an album.

9th & Walnut, which will be out on July 23, features 18 tracks written between 1977 and 1980 – 15 of which were never released - that until now lay dormant to all but the band themselves.

For whatever reason none of these early songs ever saw the inside of a recording studio but with the release only days away drummer Bill Stevenson joined HEAVY to tell us why and what to expect.

“It is not a re-recorded album,” he stressed. “These were our very, very first songs when we first started the band and they were never recorded. We recorded them years, years, years later just because we thought we should. The reason we never recorded them at the time was because we were just learning how to play. We were just kids and by the time we learned how to play and how to be a band we had gotten sick of these songs and written different ones. Then when we got older, we thought it might be fun to go back and record our first 15 songs that we ever played together and for me these were the first songs I ever played with a human being so it's very sentimental to me.”

In the full interview, Bill talks about the reasons behind finally recording the songs, the memories they invoked, how much the band has changed musically, the one cover song and why it is on there, future new music and more.