Codefendants

A phone friendship that turned into a band

Codefendants did not start in a rehearsal room. Sam King, who sings in the San Francisco punk band Get Dead, and the Connecticut rapper Julio "Ceschi" Ramos became friends over the phone during the pandemic lockdowns, and the friendship turned into work the moment Ramos flew to Los Angeles at King's invitation. They cut a song called "Abscessed" in a single night, then kept going for a year, eventually living in the same house and swapping voice memos constantly. "We're working artists. We make shit all the time," Ramos said in May 2023, and King's interjection — "We hadn't worked!" — is a fair account of what lockdown did to two musicians who normally live on tour.

The third member arrived with a record label attached. Fat Mike of NOFX, who founded Fat Wreck Chords, is credited with founding Codefendants in 2021 as a project mixing hip hop, new wave and punk rock. King and Ramos, speaking in April 2026, date the thing itself to 2022 and describe Mike's arrival as the point at which their two-person collaboration acquired an official third member and a producer at its centre. Either way, the division of labour has held: Ramos and King write and sing, Mike produces.

King's shorthand for the sound has not changed much across four years of interviews. "It's like a horseshoe. You got punk rock coming from one side, hip hop on the other, and they meet in the middle." The band's own word for the result is Crime Wave, and they use it as a name for the project's wider circle of collaborators as much as for the music.

This Is Crime Wave, and the point of refusing to pick a lane

The debut album, This Is Crime Wave, was released on 24 March 2023 through Bottles to the Ground, the Fat Wreck Chords imprint. It brought in The D.O.C., Stacy Dee and Onry Ozzborn alongside Get Dead, and it produced the two songs that still anchor the live set: "Def Cons" and "Suicide by Pigs". The latter remains their most-performed song by a clear margin, with 68 outings logged on setlist.fm.

What the record established was a method rather than a style. Rapped verse sits on a punk rhythm section; folk guitar gives way to electronics; the storytelling runs through street life, courts and incarceration. Ramos's own history is part of the material — he has described years in which legal restrictions stopped him travelling to Canada, breaking an otherwise annual run of Saskatoon shows that began in 2008 after he met the producer Factor Chandelier in the mid-2000s.

Lifers: written in a Las Vegas house, released in April 2026

The second album was begun in 2023, while all three members were living together in Las Vegas through what King and Ramos have described as a period of personal upheaval. It was announced in February 2026 and arrived digitally on 3 April 2026 on Bottles to the Ground, produced by Fat Mike, with eleven tracks: "What You Get", "Rivals" featuring The D.O.C., "Lonely Life", "Art of Protest", "The Fix", "Lifers", "Crime Wave", "Bad Business", "Right Wrong Man", "The Weather Men" and "Ditch The Party".

Fat Mike gave fair warning of what was coming when the album was announced: "They can expect the unexpected on this album… Little Bossa Nova, little Hardcore, little Simon and Garfunkel." The guest list extends past The D.O.C., who also appeared on the debut's "Fast Ones", to members of the Venezuelan band Zeta and the Arizona musician N8NOFACE.

Reviewing it on 16 April 2026, ThePunkSite walked through the record's deliberate incoherence: a piano-led opening in "What You Get", a hip-hop, metal and punk hybrid in "Rivals", cello and violin arrangements on "Art of Protest", "The Fix" alternating 1980s synth with punk vocals, the title track as a ballad, and "Ditch The Party" closing on a defiant note. The reviewer put it at the top of their year, arguing that the risk-taking is the punk part, not the guitars. The album's line about the cost — "we know it's all falling apart, these are the risks we take for art, but we don't care, we do it our way" — has become the shorthand quote for the record.

Where they stand, late October 2026

2026 has been close to a year of continuous touring. The band opened it in Australia in February with shows in Coolangatta, Nambour, Brisbane, Thornbury, Adelaide and Melbourne. Album week was spent in Canada, including a sold-out Saskatoon date. They played Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado on 18 April with Sublime, the Sublime Me Gusta Festival in Fort Worth on 9 May, Louder Than Life on 19 September and Aftershock on 4 October.

The European leg has run through October: The Key Club in Leeds on 14 October, O2 Academy Islington in London on 16 October, Glazart in Paris on 20 October, Metropool in Enschede on 21 October, De Vierde Zaal in Gentbrugge on 22 October, then Cologne on 23 October, Skaters Palace in Münster on 24 October, Kulturzentrum Faust in Hanover on 25 October and Knust in Hamburg on 27 October. Still to come are SO36 in Berlin on 28 October, Das Bett in Frankfurt on 29 October, Hansa 39 in Munich on 31 October, Arena Wien on 2 November, Gala Hala in Ljubljana on 3 November and Legend Club in Milan on 6 November.

After Europe the schedule goes back to the United States: the Vans Warped Tour in Orlando on 14 and 15 November, the Sublime Reef Madness Cruise out of Miami from 15 to 19 November, Bizarre Bar in Las Vegas on 3 December and Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona on 11 December.

Both singers have work running alongside the band. King is launching Cassette Magazine, a quarterly publication built around 30-minute cassettes carrying interviews and music from underground hip-hop artists. A collaborative record between Ramos and Factor Chandelier was slated for later in 2026.

On stage, the trio is a duo

Fat Mike does not tour with Codefendants and never has in any sustained way; the pattern was set as early as the autumn after the debut, when four "duo" Midwest shows were announced with Ramos and King but no Mike. He is the studio member, and the live act is the two singers, which is how the Yorkshire Post described the band when it reviewed The Key Club in Leeds on 16 October 2026 — Ceschi and Sam King of Get Dead, made in the studio with Fat Mike. That review found the set political, scathing, emotional and high on energy, with Ramos's rapped accounts of street life, prison sentences and wasted youth set against Get Dead's punk delivery. Two people in the crowd got engaged on stage.

The European shows have settled on a tight shape: thirteen songs, roughly 65 minutes — the Paris show ran 21:15 to 22:20 — opening with "What You Get" and closing on the instrumental sign-off "Coda-fendants". In between come "The Fix", "Abscessed", "Def Cons", "Art of Protest", "Lifers", "Brutiful", "The Weathermen", "Prison Camp", "Crime Wave" and "Fast Ones". Longer nights earlier in the year pulled in Ramos's solo material, including "Say Something" and "Middle Earth", plus "Lonely Life", "Counting Back from 13", "The Right Wrong Man", "Bad Business", an a cappella verse of "Living Las Vegas" and "Sell Me Youth". None of it is choreographed. "We don't sit there and talk about what we're gonna do on stage," King said in April. "We have moments, and we'll yell them out."