Reissues, Iggy, and a Fall EP: San Diego's Summer of Looking Back and Leaning In

If you spent this month digging through the local record bins, you'd be forgiven for thinking someone raided the vault. San Diego's summer release slate has been heavy on reverence — but the good kind, the kind that reminds you this town's catalog runs deep.

Exhibit A: Rocket from the Crypt, the horn-blasting patron saints of local rock, saw their 1995 landmark Scream, Dracula Scream! get a fresh black-and-white splatter-vinyl reissue. Exhibit B: Stephen Bishop's 1976 debut Careless returned on confetti-splatter wax with two previously unreleased tracks and a 20-page booklet. And Blink-182 — Poway's finest export — announced a 25th-anniversary reissue of Take Off Your Pants and Jacket with six bonus cuts and a limited silver pressing for indie shops.

But the most San Diego item of the month isn't a reissue at all. It's a name-drop. Drummer Mario Rubalcaba — of Rocket from the Crypt, Hot Snakes, and roughly half the great bands this city has produced — is set to sit behind the kit for Iggy Pop at the Mosswood Meltdown festival in Oakland on July 18. Let that land: one of our guys, keeping time for the Godfather of Punk.

Looking forward, garage-pop outfit The Mothmen have a new EP, Love Letters, slated for fall via Octo-Beat Records, cut at Earthling Studios with local knob-twister Mike Kamoo and wrapped in cover art by Pat Beers. It's the sound of the scene doing what it does best — recording itself, releasing itself, on its own terms.

The throughline here is a scene comfortable in its own history. San Diego has never been a town that waited for permission from Los Angeles, ninety minutes up the 5. It presses its own records, reissues its own classics, and lends its drummers to the legends when the legends come calling.

Careless, indeed. We prefer to call it confident.

Sources: San Diego Music News / July 2026 — The SceneSD; San Diego Music Release News / June 2026 — The SceneSD