CF98

A name from the periodic table

The band formed in Kraków in 2003 and took their name from californium, the synthetic element with atomic number 98. Vocalist Karolina Duszkiewicz has explained the choice in terms of the element's use in metal detectors — the idea of finding something worth having in unpromising ground — rather than anything to do with chemistry.

For their first decade and a half they were a local proposition. The early records were released in Poland and sung partly in Polish: a debut with the unwieldy title Tiny Drum, Apple Juice and a Virgin Island on the Magic Store in 2008, Nic do stracenia in 2010, and 13 in 2013. None of them travelled far beyond the Polish circuit.

The line that matters in their history is 2017, when the band relaunched. From that point they worked the European club network hard, built a reputation on a do-it-yourself footing, and eventually took the band to the UK and Japan as well as across mainland Europe. The current roster is a six-piece, with Duszkiewicz fronting it alongside Aleksander Domagalski, Karol Grela, Krzysztof Kościelski, Michał Stabrawa and Szymon Piotrowski.

The records that got them out of Poland

Story Makers, in 2017, was the first album of the second phase. Two EPs followed and kept the band visible between albums: Rotten To The Core in 2019 and Dead Inside in 2020, both of which sit on their Bandcamp page alongside the full-lengths.

This Is Fine, released on 2 September 2022 through the Austrian label SBÄM Records, was the record that established them outside Poland. Duszkiewicz described it at the time as pop and skate punk filtered through the band's own habits, and put the breadth down to the members listening to different things: 'I think this is our super-power, that we all listen to different styles of music, and you can actually hear that influence on This Is Fine.' She has called the lyrics her diary from 2021, written so that each song told a separate story — adventure, sport, life in a van, and social subjects among them.

The touring that followed took them to Punk Rock Holiday in Slovenia and SBÄM Fest in Austria, both of which they played again in 2025, along with the Krach am Bach festival in Germany.

Stupid Punk and a change of direction

Stupid Punk arrived on 24 October 2025, issued by SBÄM Records in Europe and Double Helix Records in the United States. Pete Zen produced it; the cover art came from Oscar Puig of the Spanish band Blowfuse. It runs to ten songs — Hate My Life, 1993, Stupid Boy, Nobody Wants To Party, It Will Never Work Out, Find Your Own Way, Love Me Or Hate Me, Calculated, Bad World and Dear Friends Of Mine — with Sammy of WSTR guesting on the fourth and Zen himself on the fifth. A deluxe edition adds four acoustic versions, and the vinyl was pressed in neon green and neon magenta.

Announcing the album in September 2025, Duszkiewicz set out the shift plainly: 'This record is about where we came from and where we're going. We've always loved skate punk, but this time we wanted to let in more of the sounds that feel real to us now.' The band's own summary was blunter — loud, fun and honest, fast and catchy and 'a little stupid, in the best way possible'. Nobody Wants To Party went out as the single ahead of release.

Reviewers picked up the same thing. Writing for Away From Life, Tobi noted the move away from skate punk towards the territory of Neck Deep, Blink-182 and Simple Plan, with early-2000s production touches, arcade-game intros and piano turning up across the ten tracks; initially sceptical about the change, he found the mixture refreshing and expected the record to show up in end-of-year lists. Thoughts Words Action gave it ten out of ten on 27 October 2025, describing an album about being an adult who still feels like a confused teenager — keeping friendships going as lives diverge, refusing to conform — and crediting the production with keeping garage-band sincerity underneath the polish. The comparisons that review reached for were Sum 41, Goldfinger and Avril Lavigne on one side, Paramore, The Bombpops and Neck Deep on the other.

Where they stand in 2026

The band have not sat on the album. On 14 July 2026 they released a standalone single, Overwhelmed, again produced, mixed and mastered by Pete Zen and put out themselves rather than through a label. They describe it as a song about anxiety written, in their words, for all the millennials in 2026.

In April 2026 they played Manchester Punk Festival, the eleventh edition of an event that spreads across venues in Manchester city centre over the Easter weekend and was named best small festival at the UK Festival Awards. It was a useful room for a band whose English-language material now sits closer to British pop punk than to the Polish scene they came from.

September 2026 brought a short home run through Wrocław, Poznań and Kraków in the middle of the month. After that the band turn west for the longest stretch of the Stupid Punk campaign so far.

The autumn run

Thirteen shows are currently listed for the remainder of 2026, almost all of them in Germany: Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Bremen, Hamburg, Cologne, Oberhausen, Alfeld and Hannover, running from the last week of October into November. One casualty is already on the board — the Dresden date at Ostpol on 28 October has been cancelled by the promoter.

These are club shows rather than theatre shows. The Hannover date, at the Mephisto room inside the Kulturzentrum Faust on 12 November, is typical of the scale: doors at seven, music at eight, twenty euros in advance and twenty-five on the door, promoted jointly by a group of magazines and small promoters including SBÄM. The promotional copy for that run does not oversell the band's ambitions; it describes fast riffs, singalongs, and something close to a group therapy session for anyone who still believes pop punk saved their life in 2007. Roughly 766 people track the band for concert alerts on Songkick, against a logged history of 103 past shows — a working band rather than a rising one, playing rooms that suit the size of the audience.