In honor of the imminent ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,’ we’re shifting into high gear to determine the best chase scene in cinema history

Its two stars hated each other. It won six Oscars. It made Bong Joon-ho cry tears of joy. And now, its prequel is almost upon us.

After wowing audiences with Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller returns to the franchise’s post-apocalyptic wastelands for Furiosa, the epic origin story of the eponymous heroine (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy), premiering on Friday. As the follow-up to one of the greatest action films ever made, it’s hard to overstate the hype for Furiosa, and that was before word got out about a showstopping 15-minute sequence that required nearly 200 stuntpeople and took 78 days to shoot. While Furiosa will have its own distinct flavor, as is true of every Mad Max movie, there’s one thing that unites these projects: intense, jaw-dropping scenes of vehicular mayhem. And what better way to honor the franchise than by celebrating what it does best?

Ahead of Furiosa’s release, we’ve put together our definitive ranking of the best car chases in cinema. There weren’t any strict rules in place, other than capping the list at 20—mostly for my own sanity—and limiting every franchise to one entry. (Apologies to Fury Road’s kickass predecessor The Road Warrior.) We also won’t discriminate against scenes that feature motorbikes, so long as cars (and/or trucks) remain part of the equation. As for what, exactly, constitutes a good car chase? Like list making, it’s bound to be subjective, but I tend to gravitate toward two key elements: the skill of the stuntwork on display and the ways in which a filmmaker conveys the action in relation to the story. (Also, the less CGI, the better.) Buckle up, ’cause we’re not wasting any time shifting into high gear.

20. Quantum of Solace (2008)

There have been some memorable car chases in the James Bond franchise: the first sequence featuring the iconic Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger, the corkscrew jump in The Man With the Golden Gun, the Lotus Esprit submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me. But I’m going with a somewhat controversial pick here: Quantum of Solace. There are many issues with Quantum of Solace—namely, it was one of the most high-profile blockbusters affected by the 2007-08 writers strike—but its opening scene isn’t one of them. Picking up right where Casino Royale left off, we find Bond (Daniel Craig) evading henchmen through the narrow roads around Italy’s Lake Garda. The frenetic, furious chase mirrors Bond’s sense of anguish after losing Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), the woman he opened his heart to, and his relentless quest for answers. It’s a thrilling tone-setter for Quantum of Solace and one that doesn’t overstay its welcome, capped off by Bond sending his final pursuers flying off a cliff:

If we’re being honest, though, it feels like James Bond has yet to create a franchise-defining car chase. Perhaps that’s a mission the newest 007, whoever it ends up being, can undertake.

19. Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (2015)

The Mission: Impossible franchise is no stranger to electrifying chase scenes, the best of which find Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt working up his heart rate. When it comes to action behind the wheel, though, Fallout tends to dominate the discussion—even on this very website. But I think the vehicular chase in Rogue Nation is being slept on. What we have is effectively two sequences for the price of one: The first finds Hunt pursuing Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) by car through the narrow streets of Casablanca alongside some nefarious henchmen; the second sees him continue the chase outside the city on motorbike. (Adding to the chaos: Hunt had only just been resuscitated, and he’s clearly not all there.) In terms of death-defying stunts for the audience’s entertainment, a helmetless Cruise taking corners like a MotoGP racer is child’s play compared to his other exploits, but the actor’s authentic reaction to scraping his knee on the road underlines that there’s no one else in Hollywood doing it like him:

We’ll be sure to update this ranking if and when Cruise does something even more dangerous down the road, pun unintended.

18. Vanishing Point (1971)

A movie that counts the likes of Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino among its biggest fans, Vanishing Point is the first of a few entries on this ranking that’s essentially one extended car chase. The film stars Barry Newman as Kowalski, a man tasked with delivering a Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum from Colorado to California while eluding police across four states. One of Kowalski’s most memorable run-ins comes when a guy driving a Jaguar E-Type convertible challenges him to an impromptu race. Incredibly, we’re expected to believe the man in the Jag comes out of this crash in one piece:

Vanishing Point might not boast the impressive production values of other movies on this list, but considering Tarantino would go on to feature a white Challenger in Death Proof, its influence in the car cinema canon is undeniable.

17. Fast Five (2011)

Let’s face it, Fast & Furious has seen better days. Some believe the franchise’s dip in quality coincided with the death of Paul Walker; others are dismayed by the pivot from street racing to absurd feats of superherodom—emphasis on the Dom. Perhaps it’s a bit of both, but the very best movie in the series, Fast Five, manages to strike the perfect balance: It’s a relatively grounded heist thriller that nevertheless takes the franchise to ridiculous new heights. After Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew steal $100 million from a Brazilian kingpin, they drag the entire bank vault holding the money through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, all while being pursued by authorities. It’s a delightfully destructive sequence that does untold damage to Rio’s infrastructure and features some of the most bone-crunching crashes committed to film:

If the Fast franchise is going to break out of its recent slump, it would do well to remember that there’s nothing better than letting its heroes live their lives a quarter mile at a time—no detours to outer space required.

16. The Blues Brothers (1980)

A good car chase isn’t reserved just for action flicks: Comedies can get in on the act, too. In The Blues Brothers, starring the recurring Saturday Night Live characters played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the beloved bandmates must prevent the foreclosure of the orphanage where they were raised by scrounging together $5,000. Naturally, that’s easier said than done: Along the way, the Blues Brothers draw the attention of neo-Nazis, a country-and-western band, and local police. While The Blues Brothers has amusing gags and musical numbers, its chase sequences with the Brothers behind the wheel of a 1974 Dodge Monaco are what really steal the show—and none are better than a climactic pursuit across Chicago. More than 60 old police cars were used in the film, some of which are wrecked in a comically over-the-top pileup:

The sheer scale of The Blues Brothers’ final set piece is commendable in and of itself—as is the movie’s commitment to treating real-life cars like a bunch of Hot Wheels.

15. Baby Driver (2017)

For good and for ill, Edgar Wright’s movies exude an abundance of style, and Baby Driver is no exception. Baby Driver is centered on a clever gimmick: The action works in tandem with its soundtrack because the film’s protagonist, Baby (Ansel Elgort), suffers from tinnitus and constantly plays music to drown out the ringing. When everything’s clicking into place, Baby Driver feels like a supersized series of music videos, and nothing hits quite like its opening sequence. Baby acts as the getaway driver for a bank robbery while listening to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms.” The ensuing chase works around rhythms of the song, as if Baby’s Subaru WRX were the star of its own dance number. Take nothing away from the actual driving, either, which puts the rally car to good use:

Baby Driver’s gimmick stretches a little thin by the end, but it’s hard to deny the crowd-pleasing power of Wright’s film when it’s firing on all cylinders.

14. The Raid 2 (2014)

With a trio of kickass Indonesian martial arts films under his belt, Gareth Evans has established himself as one of the most exciting action directors on the planet—someone who seems most in his element staging positively brutal hand-to-hand combat. In The Raid 2, however, Evans also brought his signature brand of carnage to the road. While there’s some cleverly executed close-quarters fighting within the confines of an SUV, courtesy of Iko Uwais’s hard-hitting protagonist, what really cements this sequence’s greatness are the moments when Evans turns the cars into an extension of the characters’ fists:

This belongs in an entirely new category of combat: car fights. There are so many action scenes in The Raid 2 worth writing home about—the kitchen showdown is an all-timer—but the fact that Evans casually tossed in an unforgettable car chase shows why he’s one of one.

13. The Driver (1978)

I’ll say this for Walter Hill’s The Driver: It sure lives up to its title. In this stripped-down thriller—one where none of the characters have a name—we follow the Driver (Ryan O’Neal), a getaway driver who has become a thorn in the side of the LAPD. In the film’s best scene, we see its taciturn protagonist living up to his reputation. With the Driver behind the wheel of a 1974 Ford Galaxie, a cat-and-mouse game unfolds when a handful of police cars are hot on his tail. What I love about this sequence is the pared-down nature of it all: The Driver outwits the cops as much as he outraces them. (Though, ironically, that wasn’t entirely by design: As Hill later explained, an accident on the last night of shooting meant they had to cobble together what had already been filmed.) Frankly, you’d never know the difference from the finished article:

If the general vibes of The Driver seem familiar, that’s because it was a major inspiration for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which just so happened to feature an unnamed protagonist (Ryan Gosling) evading police through the streets of Los Angeles.

12. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

The shaky-cam style of the Bourne franchise isn’t for everyone—just ask John Woo—but credit where it’s due: These movies know how to deliver a good chase scene. (A friendly reminder that The Bourne Legacy is an underrated gem with an awesome motorbike sequence to boot.) But there’s one Bourne chase that stands above the rest: the Moscow getaway in The Bourne Supremacy. After being wounded by the Russian assassin Kirill (Karl Urban), Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) hijacks a taxi, with both the police and Kirill in hot pursuit. This isn’t the kind of sequence that lingers on any one shot; instead, what makes it work is the frenetic nature of the editing, which allows the viewer to feel like they’re in Bourne’s fight-or-flight headspace:

If I’m being honest, I’m usually one of those people who doesn’t like the Bourne movies’ shaky-cam style, but when it’s executed with such craftsmanship, you can’t help but get caught up in its adrenaline-pumping power.

11. The Seven-Ups (1973)

Philip D’Antoni was the producer of two movies featuring Hall of Fame car chases, Bullitt and The French Connection, the latter of which won him an Oscar for Best Picture. And with his lone directorial feature, The Seven-Ups, D’Antoni sought to craft an iconic sequence of his own. The film stars Roy Scheider as NYPD detective Buddy Mannuci (elite Italian American name; I can practically smell the gabagool), who commands a unit handling major felony cases that lead to seven-plus-year prison sentences; that’s why they’re known as the Seven-Ups. Midway through the movie, when one of the team members is killed by two shooters who flee the scene, Buddy chases after them. The 10-minute sequence, which starts in the Upper West Side before moving out of the city, is thrillingly immersive, alternating between close-ups of the characters and wider shots of all the damage they’ve caused. But the chase’s defining moment comes right at the end, when Buddy narrowly avoids a grisly death:

The sequence isn’t quite at the level of Bullitt or The French Connection—very few are—but D’Antoni still manages to leave an unmistakable imprint on the car chase canon.

10. Death Proof (2007)

If you ask Quentin Tarantino, Death Proof, his knowingly trashy tribute to exploitation cinema, is the worst movie he’s ever made. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to admire about the film, which honors the unsung heroes of Hollywood: stunt performers. The first half of Death Proof follows three female friends who cross paths with Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a misogynistic serial killer who takes them out in his “death-proof” Chevy Nova. Fourteen months later, a group that includes stuntwoman Zoë Bell, playing herself, also lands on Mike’s radar. As Bell and her friends test out a ’70s Challenger, she performs a “ship’s mast” stunt, clinging onto the hood of the car with fastening belts. Unfortunately, when Mike pursues the women, it puts Bell in a precarious situation. Most of the entries on this list celebrate some next-level driving skills, but Death Proof’s inclusion is all about Bell pulling off one of the wildest stunts you’ll ever see. She’s quite literally hanging on for dear life:

If the Academy handed out Oscars to stunt performers—and let’s hope it does happen one day—Bell would’ve won in a landslide.

9. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

William Friedkin was already responsible for an all-time great car chase in The French Connection (more on that later), but the filmmaker made a commendable bid to outdo himself with To Live and Die in L.A. In this neo-noir thriller, Secret Service agent Richard Chance (William L. Petersen) is hell-bent on arresting an expert counterfeiter, Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), who kills Chance’s partner days before his retirement. To capture Masters, Chance and his new partner, John Vukovich (John Pankow), attempt to steal $50,000 from a jewelry buyer for an undercover operation. The sting goes bad when the buyer, who is later revealed to be an undercover FBI agent, is killed and a group of gunmen goes after Chance and Vukovich. It’s a clever inversion of the usual car chase formula—this time, it’s the lawmen running away from the criminals. The outside-the-box thinking extends to the film’s most astonishing stretch, in which Chance evades the gunmen by driving into oncoming traffic:

The fact that Friedkin shot the chase at the end of filming—in case anything disastrous happened to the actors—underscores just how risky the endeavor was. The pulse-pounding results speak for themselves.

8. The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

The Matrix sequels have never been held in high esteem, but I’m ready to live my truth: The Matrix Reloaded fucking rules. (If anyone’s got a problem with this take, file your complaints with the Architect.) What’s more, the film happens to boast the finest action set piece of the franchise: the highway chase. After Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) free the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim), a program capable of creating shortcuts within the Matrix, they’re pursued by the Twins (Neil and Adrian Rayment). Morpheus once warned that going on the freeway was “suicide,” and it doesn’t take long to see why: The chase draws the attention of several Agents, who repeatedly take over the bodies of other drivers on the road. The scene is the best of both worlds: There’s some incredible stuntwork on display, including when Moss weaves around on a Ducati, and CGI augments some feats of superhuman strength. But the most jaw-dropping aspect of the sequence is how it came together, as the production spent $2.5 million to construct its own highway (!) on California’s Alameda Island. If that weren’t unique enough, I’m pretty sure Reloaded is also the only movie in existence in which a katana takes out an SUV:

The Matrix remains the Wachowskis’ masterpiece, but don’t get it twisted: The filmmakers were still cooking with gas in the sequel.

7. Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

Size isn’t everything, but for H. B. Halicki, who produced, wrote, directed, and starred in Gone in 60 Seconds, it’s certainly part of the package. The indie action flick follows Maindrian Pace (Halicki), a Los Angeles insurance investigator who has a lucrative side hustle jacking high-end cars. The plot kicks into motion when a South American drug lord enlists Pace to nab 48 cars within five days in exchange for $400,000. Of course, Gone in 60 Seconds is best known for what happens after Pace is caught stealing a 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1, when he leads police on a chase that lasts a whopping 40 minutes. (More than 90 cars were destroyed in the process.) Halicki, for his part, did all the driving himself, including a spectacular jump off a makeshift ramp of crashed cars:

While Halicki wound up making a few more indies after Gone in 60 Seconds, he died in an accident on the set of its sequel. His legacy as a do-it-all daredevil, however, lives on.

6. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Long before James Cameron immersed himself in the world of Pandora, he was a pioneer of state-of-the-art visual effects. Case in point: Terminator 2: Judgment Day is credited for having the first CGI character in a blockbuster, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a killing machine composed of a futuristic liquid metal. But Cameron also understood that the CGI of that era shouldn’t be the main attraction: It worked best as a complement to the practical effects, as seen in Judgment Day’s epic viaduct chase. When the T-1000 tracks down a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) in a shopping mall, he’s saved at the last minute by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), giving John a chance to escape on his dirt bike. As the T-1000 gives chase, the David and Goliath vibes between man and machine are further epitomized by the T-1000’s commandeering of a truck. The sequence already has a terrifying sense of urgency, but it hits another level when the T-1000 crashes through the viaduct like the Kool-Aid Man:

Big Jim is still revolutionizing what can be achieved with visual effects in the Avatar franchise, and while I cherish those movies, nothing beats his old-school showmanship.

5. Duel (1971)

The feature-length debut of Steven Spielberg—perhaps you’ve heard of him—the TV movie Duel is essentially one extended chase sequence between salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) and a sinister trucker determined to drive him off the road. I’ve attached a clip from the ending of the film, but that doesn’t do Duel justice. What cements this movie’s greatness is how it sustains an unbearable level of tension across its 90-minute running time—with a budget under $500,000, no less. Spielberg’s masterstroke is never once showing us the other driver, anthropomorphizing the truck itself as a monster. (You can see a lot of similarities with how he would build suspense in Jaws.) When Mann finally gets the upper hand, tricking his adversary into driving off a cliff, it feels like you can breathe again:

Spielberg would move on to bigger and better things after Duel, but considering how much the director accomplished with so little, you can’t help but wonder what else he could conjure up with limited resources.

4. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Like Duel, Fury Road is basically one long car chase—the difference is Miller got to work with a blockbuster budget, and made every cent of it count. It’s hard to pick a single standout sequence in Fury Road, but if I had to choose, I’d go with the first attack on the War Rig after Furiosa (Charlize Theron) flees with the wives of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Here’s why: Think back to when you saw Fury Road for the first time, before you fully grasped the vehicular carnage that was in store. And then stuff like this kept happening:

To quote Steven Soderbergh’s thoughts on Fury Road: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” Whether or not Miller manages to one-up the action in Furiosa, the director is already in the pantheon.

3. The French Connection (1971)

We return to the Friedkin-verse for what may be his best film, The French Connection, the crime thriller based on Robin Moore’s 1969 nonfiction book of the same name. The story concerns two NYPD detectives, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider), and their tireless pursuit of a French heroin smuggler. But while there’s plenty to admire about how The French Connection illustrates the thin line between police and criminals, its greatest claim to fame is its car chase. After Popeye narrowly survives a sniper attack, he goes after the shooter, who escapes on an elevated train. The ensuing sequence is true daredevil filmmaking that Friedkin shot without permits, leading to real crashes with New Yorkers that made the final cut. But Friedkin’s finest touch was mounting a camera to the front of the car, making the audience feel like they’re part of the action:

My Ringer colleague Justin Sayles believes The French Connection’s chase should’ve landed at no. 1, and I’m sure many folks will agree with him. Being the only film on this list to win Best Picture, however, is a solid consolation prize.

2. Bullitt (1968)

When it comes to modern car chases, all roads lead back to Bullitt. A Dad Cinema classic, the film stars Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt, a San Francisco detective who pursues a group of mobsters after a key witness is killed in protective custody. In his search for answers, Bullitt realizes he’s being tailed by a couple of hitmen, and then turns the tables on them. From there, the chase is on. Aside from McQueen doing most of his own stunts behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback, what’s so impressive about the sequence is how timeless it is. Even the little imperfections, like hubcaps repeatedly coming off the wheels, work to the film’s advantage, stressing just how much these drivers are living on a razor’s edge. It’s been more than 50 years since Bullitt revolutionized the car chase, and yet few movies since have felt like they’re pushing the envelope to such an exhilarating degree:

That the car driven by McQueen was recently sold at auction for $3.74 million, a then-record price for a Mustang, underlines Bullitt’s enduring legacy.

1. Ronin (1998)

“If I’m going to do a car chase,” filmmaker John Frankenheimer said in an interview with the American Society of Cinematographers, “I’m going to do a car chase that’s going to make somebody think about whether or not they want to do another one!” Boy, did he ever. In Frankenheimer’s late-career masterpiece, Ronin, the director actually incorporated several chases, but it’s the climactic sequence that stands alone as the greatest ever filmed. The movie concerns an international group of mercenaries who are hired to steal a mysterious briefcase; a series of double-crosses and double-bluffs ensue. But for the final chase, all you need to know is that Sam (Robert De Niro), a mercenary with ties to the CIA, is in pursuit of Deirdre (Natascha McElhone), an IRA operative in possession of the case. Winding through the streets and tunnels of Paris, what’s most striking is just how fluid it all feels. You’re completely engrossed in the chase’s forward momentum, captured from every conceivable angle; a symphony of controlled chaos. The driving styles even reflect the characters: Deirdre is reckless and impulsive, while Sam remains calm and controlled.

There are many worthy car chases in this ranking, but in my view, Ronin takes pole position. And while I can’t imagine a movie ever topping what Frankenheimer achieved, I’d love nothing more than to be proved wrong.

At a dive bar in L.A., Fred Armisen is living a not-so-secret life as a punk musician. But here’s the punch line: It’s no joke.

It’s happy hour at the Permanent Records Roadhouse, a dive bar and record store in a potholed stretch of east Los Angeles, and Fred Armisen is advising the audience to talk through his set. “Feel free to text, interrupt, go, and come back,” he says. “Whatever you want to do.”

Armisen is a substantial name in comedy from his time on Saturday Night Live, but he’s never been known to hog the spotlight—so it’s not exactly a surprise to find that he’s indifferent to the way people treat him onstage. (Or, in this case, not even a stage, but rather just a checkerboard floor area at the far end of the bar.) He’s less a brand than a comedic support beam—someone prone to appearing in scenes where other people, usually more famous than him, perform parts that bounce off of or lean on him from the place in the back where he’s been shoved, waiting patiently to deliver a deadpan joke or two. Sometimes he doesn’t deliver a joke at all; sometimes the joke is that he’s just … standing there.

At the Roadhouse, another offer that Armisen extends to his audience is for them to feel free to let him know if he has any of the chords wrong. This is because he’s not doing stand-up or sketch comedy. He’s not even doing segments from his music-oriented Netflix special, Standup for Drummers. Instead, he’s performing Fred Armisen’s Playlist Live, a set of punk-rock covers—just him and a guitar, often aided by a drum machine, playing his favorites by bands like Buzzcocks, the Clash, and Misfits.

The night I’m there, in January, he walks onstage wearing a jacket emblazoned with various patches related to the sketch show he starred in with Carrie Brownstein, Portlandia (there was, indeed, a bird on it)—a wrap present, as he’d explain to us later, given to cast and crew. Wearing his trademark thick-rimmed glasses, he still looks much the same (albeit with less hair) as when he first made a name for himself in the comedy scene over 25 years ago, with a VHS-era viral tape of pranks and bits done at South by Southwest.

There’s some occasional stage banter at the Roadhouse, sure, but for the most part, the show isn’t designed to draw laughs. Armisen clicks on a drum machine, finds a good tempo, and then starts looping together guitar parts, building a ramshackle—but still impressive—version of XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel.” When the song ends, there’s no punch line.

I first heard about Armisen’s punk show in an Instagram post by the Roadhouse, which, by the time it entered my feed, was promoting an event long since sold out. (The capacity for a show in the bar is around 100.) I figured I’d missed my chance, but then I kept seeing the same show advertised again and again. It turns out that Armisen, 57, just does this about once a month, whenever he can, bringing gear over from a practice space down the street. The sets have a $5 cover—“It’s kind of what fuels my whole empire,” Armisen tells me later, over a video call—and there will be two a night, one at 6 p.m. and one at 9 p.m. The performances are prompt and concise because, Armisen says, “I do believe everyone wants to go home.”

If you just stumbled into the Roadhouse one night and found the guy from Wednesday playing “Blitzkrieg Bop,” it might be a little jarring. But Armisen’s relationship with music actually goes back much further than his relationship with comedy.

“Even before I met him,” Late Night host Seth Meyers tells me, “there was this sort of bubbling Legend of Fred: this drummer who’d done Blue Man Group, who just decided one day to become a comedian, and then could immediately do it better than people like me, who’ve been trying to do comedy our whole lives.”

This Blue Man Group detail is true: Armisen really was part of the larger Blue Man ensemble in the late ’90s, which he’s described as “life-changing.” Previous to that, Armisen was working in cafes and playing drums in Trenchmouth, a Chicago-based industrial post-punk group of some note that could best be described—for better or worse at points in their eight-year run—as “angular.” Trenchmouth frontman Damon Locks had been inspired by the D.C. hardcore scene that he grew up in but met Armisen at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Armisen first approached Locks to discuss his jacket, which had a hand-painted depiction of the Damned album Machine Gun Etiquette, and they’ve been friends ever since.

“Fred was super interested in Bow Wow Wow and the Clash and Blondie,” Locks tells me, “and had this kind of angle that wasn’t coming from hardcore.” As a pairing for Locks’s intense vocals—at points resembling H.R. from Bad Brains, D. Boon from Minutemen, and others—Armisen opted for a less overtly aggressive style on drums. “Sometimes he would stand up,” Locks remembers, “because I think that he had seen, like, Tito Puente concerts.” (Later, Armisen would take that tendency and turn it into the character Fericito.)

Armisen was born to a Venezuelan mother and German father, and he briefly lived in Brazil as a child. As to how, exactly, he became a punk fan out of that combo, Armisen notes that salsa and merengue music is “kind of repetitive” in the same way that, say, the Ramones’ rhythm section is. “Even the aesthetics are pretty gothy,” he says of Brazil. “There’s definitely a scary element to that. And I remember soap operas that were on TV—there’s a morbid quality to them. They’re really into funerals and stuff.”

Eventually coming of age in Long Island, Armisen found himself uninterested in the “long hair, people in vans, and long guitar solos” that defined the mainstream rock scene of the late ’70s. Bands like Devo and Talking Heads, who “looked like students,” were a rebellion to the rebellion—one step beyond the Zeppelin-ish musical world that people like his parents had long since accepted. “[Punk] just gave me identity,” he says.

The general image of punk—particularly the first generation of lip-curlers, such as Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious—is caustic and snarling. But Armisen has never really embodied that image himself. Soft-spoken and approachable, he’s cheerful in a casual way. “He’s definitely more of an optimist than I am,” says Carrie Brownstein, taking a call a few hours before performing a show with her group Sleater-Kinney. “I think he wants to see the good in people.” In candid photographs of Armisen in the real world, he’ll usually be smiling meekly with one hand raised, greeting you with a pleasant “hello.”

To Armisen, his demeanor and love of punk aren’t mutually exclusive. “If you think of what the classic punk bands look like, there is something wispy and kind of gentle,” he says. “Even though they’re going like this”—here he snarls—“I’m like, ‘Ah, you’re sweet.’” He says it’s not like he doesn’t have a darker side in his head, like the rest of us. “But then when I actually talk,” he says, “it just comes out quieter. Maybe I just don’t have a very loud voice.”

When people used to ask Armisen whether he secretly wanted to be a comedian while he was grinding it out on the indie-rock circuit, he would tell them he had no idea. But in recent years he’s started to realize that it was percolating the whole time—the jokes in the van, the banter in between songs onstage. There was also the fact that his interest in music wasn’t entirely about the music.

“The answer is really that I think I always had my eye on comedy,” he says, “in that a lot of bands that I liked have a sort of theatrical, visual thing going that did seem kind of comedic.” Outré punk creations such as Devo’s Booji Boy and the Damned’s Captain Sensible—presented almost like characters in theater productions—interested him more than just the raw intensity of hardcore. “It wasn’t quite comedy, but there was something sort of not that serious about them.” (In 2018, Armisen played drums for Devo at a festival show.)

Armisen was the first one in Trenchmouth to decide he was done, which led the group to break up after the release of their 1996 album, The Broadcasting System. In 2000, at the age of 33, Armisen moved to L.A. and charmed his way into performing stand-up at the melting-pot venue Largo, having barely done professional comedy before. Within a few months, he made it onto Late Night With Conan O’Brien, doing a set as a hapless self-defense expert. (“You can clap your hands to deafen the assailant,” he suggests.) By 2002, he was cast on SNL. “The only thing that was surprising about his entry into comedy,” Locks says, “was how fast it escalated.”

I ask Armisen whether his time in Trenchmouth helped him become a comedian—if the timing element of being a drummer helped him with the delivery of jokes, for example. He says it was actually more useful in terms of knowing how to work within a group. “The role of a drummer in a band is, like, you’re just back there making all this noise,” he says, “and how do you lay out for some of it? How do you complement the bass player? How do you become not a show-off, but then how do you have flourishes so it’s entertaining? So that’s kind of where I see more of the link.”

Seth Meyers met Armisen when they were both newbies on SNL. These days, Meyers features him as his on-again, off-again band leader on Late Night. Thinking back on his SNL run, Meyers says one of his proudest creations is the 2013 sketch “History of Punk,” a mockumentary short in which Armisen plays Ian Rubbish, a Johnny Rotten–style icon who despises the monarchy but adores Margaret Thatcher for some reason. (“She works every day of the week,” he chides his audience, “including Saturday.”) I had always assumed that sketch came straight from Armisen, but it actually came from Meyers, who was utilizing the love of punk rock that Armisen had instilled in him.

Meyers wrote it—complete with a Bill Grundy interview—and then tasked Armisen with writing the various songs featured within it, like “Cunt in a Crown” and “Sweet Iron Lady.” After it aired, IFC approached Meyers, Armisen, and Bill Hader about making an entire show about Rubbish; the trio used that offer to make Documentary Now!, in which Armisen would write other songs for fake bands, like the soft-rock Eagles parody, the Blue Jean Committee. The venerable indie label Drag City would eventually put out Catalina Breeze, an EP of Blue Jean Committee songs written by Armisen. Decades after quitting the indie-rock life, Armisen was label-mates with Royal Trux and Silver Jews.

“I do think that the reason he’s a good songwriter,” Meyers says, “is because he does it the same way he does comedy, which is, it’s never needy. And you have a real comfort watching him because I’ve never seen Fred panic with silence. He so embodies the characters he’s playing and he’s just sort of like, Look, this is the way I’m gonna do it, you’re not going to affect it. You can enjoy it or not. He does know his comedy instrument as well as he knows the other ones.”

For the bit, Armisen has written songs—such as the Bjelland Brothers’ “Sparkling Apple Juice” (a Top 200 hit in Minnesota) and Crisis of Conformity’s “Fist Fight!”—that have actually been stuck in my head. (Studio versions of both fine songs are also available for purchase from Drag City.) But when I ask whether he ever tries to sit down and write songs in earnest, Armisen says he doesn’t feel the drive to create music outside of the purview of specific characters. “It’s only if I’m making fun of a genre that chords can come out,” he says. “If it’s me, it’s not there.”

The idea with the Roadhouse shows, Armisen tells me, was that they would be a modern update of the lounge singer act. “It’s just pure nostalgia,” he says. “And it’s kind of the equivalent of what someone playing standards at a piano bar would be. In the ’70s, someone was playing all the standards from the ’40s. That’s what this should feel like.”

There’s something a little more subversive about Armisen’s song selection than he’s giving himself credit for, to be sure; the contemporary equivalent of a yesteryear lounge singer playing “Summer Wind” would not be someone thrashing through Hüsker Dü’s “Never Talking to You Again.” But the way that classic punk music now pacifies instead of provokes does beg the question of what the genre even stands for anymore.

“I feel a little let down by punk,” Locks tells me. “I’m just not as interested in the long game of what it turned out to be.” To Locks, the punk ethos was supposed to be more than just a sound—it was supposed to be “doing something.” He still sees the original essence being tapped into in other ways, but as a strict genre, “I feel like it’s someone from high school that I haven’t talked to in a really long time,” he says.

Armisen says he never had any concern about sacrificing punk ideals to join a machine as big as SNL, partially because he doesn’t think abstaining from corporations was ever a moralistic requirement in the first place. Bands like the Clash and Talking Heads, he points out, were on major labels, and he was introduced to plenty of great indie bands on shows like MTV’s 120 Minutes. “My belief is it’s just art being brought to you by whatever organization it is,” Armisen says.

Confused as to how I felt about this myself, I began asking people around Armisen if they thought it was fair to call him “punk.” If this celebrity, who dates popular actresses and goes to Steve Martin’s house for dinner parties, is worthy of the title—whatever it might mean in 2024. Brownstein, anyway, isn’t so sure. “Is Fred a punk?” she repeats, laughing. “Probably not.”

Still, Brownstein concedes, Armisen’s ongoing relationship to the music he loves is “intriguing in that he sort of questions, ‘What did punk ever mean?’” she says. “He just has this way of defanging punk.” She added, “That’s the reason why a lot of punks don’t age very well, is because they sort of were putting on the plastic vampire fangs for five or 10 years and then popping them out. [They] stopped dyeing their hair and got normal jobs. And I think Fred has a way of seeing the humanity in all of that and exploring it.”

Case in point: a recent sketch Armisen put together for John Mulaney’s talk show, Everybody’s in L.A., which gathered punk luminaries such as Exene Cervenka of X and Lee Ving of Fear for an “Old Punks Focus Group.” “Look at all those fucking turds,” Mike Watt groans, after Armisen shows the group a picture of a cruise ship.

Others, however, were less hesitant to give Armisen credit for keeping the punk flame alive. “There’s something really punk about being Fred’s age,” Meyers says, “and still being one step ahead of what anybody guesses you’re going to do next.” When Locks thinks about it, he suggests that Armisen—being a prominent figure in TV and movies—making himself available to a small group of people in a low-stakes environment is a radical gesture in and of itself. “That’s really cool,” he says. “And that’s very punk.”

In 2015, Armisen went on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and he spoke candidly about some aspects of his life that were bubbling up into public discourse. In the wake of a messy divorce from the actress Elisabeth Moss, who said in 2012 that “the greatest impersonation [Armisen] does is that of a normal person”), Armisen said he was working on how to be better to romantic partners.

“I have a problem with intimacy where all of a sudden there’s a real person there,” he told Maron. “I say these things because I’m not finished being a person.” At that time, he seemed to be figuring out what the second half of his life would look like, asking himself that difficult question that looms over punks as they get older: Am I going to pop out the plastic vampire fangs and grow up or not?

On a 2019 episode of Sam Jones’s Off Camera, Armisen told a story that stuck with me, about what inspired his realization that he wanted to quit being an indie-level musician. It was back in the ’90s in Chicago, and he surreptitiously caught a glimpse of an older indie-rock drummer he recognized lugging his gear around. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to end up like him,’” Armisen said. The story is somewhat brutal, and candid in a way you don’t often get from an artist discussing the optics of middle age. But it’s revealing, nonetheless. Music is a tough way to make a living. It’s even tougher to maintain your dignity while doing it as someone over the age of 40.

After I bring up the story to him again, Armisen says he already looks at that moment differently than when he told it to Jones five years ago. “If we really want to analyze it,” he figures, “I was also saying that that’s not where my passion is.” Armisen says he never had his heart in it when Trenchmouth was in the studio, for instance, as the rest of the group was obsessing over the granular process of recording and mixing. “It wasn’t a judgment on that [drummer on the street],” he says. “I’m sure he was having a perfectly pleasant day. I’m sure he’s doing great. It was more about myself.”

Now that Armisen has, in some sense, turned into that older guy lugging his gear into a venue anyway, I ask him if he would like to still be doing these kinds of shows even when he’s 80. “Actually, doing stuff like the Roadhouse is probably best for someone who’s 80,” he says. “If I lived down the street and lumbered over. Maybe not as much equipment, but just sort of like”—here he adopts a grumpy old man voice—“‘Hi, everybody.’”

While wrapping up his recent Roadhouse show, Armisen does what most people in the crowd probably want to hear him do instead: crack jokes. He talks about being aghast after meeting a baby who doesn’t know who Michael Stipe is, then apologizes if the music is too loud, noting that he has earplugs in. “Ah, I shouldn’t have admitted that to you,” he says. “That’s so not punk.” Then he catches himself. “But now it is punk.”

Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, and elsewhere.

OSTRAVA. Tre Kronor har haft stora powerplay i gruppspelet på VM.

På träningen inför sista gruppspelsmatcherna ändrade förbundskaptenen Sam Hallam i formationerna.

Tidigare under gruppspelet så splittrades polarna och storstjärnorna Erik Karlsson och Victor Herdman i backparen.

Nu får de heller inte fortsätta tillsammans i den första powerplay-uppställningen.

I stället få de styra spelet på point vid blålinjen i varsin av de två enheterna.

Erik Karlsson flyttas upp från vänstra tekningscirkeln, Rasmus Dahlin byter från point i PP2 till vänster i PP1.

I numerärt överläge har Tre Kronor en effektivitet på 18,18 procent, vilket är sämre än toppnationerna Kanada, USA, Schweiz och Tjeckien.

Mojo tillbaka i laget

Sam Hallam har uttalat att de uppställningarna de ställer upp med mot Slovakien på tisdagskvällen är de som är planerade in i slutspelet.

Marcus Johansson som fick vila i 3–1-segern mot Frankrike kommer tillbaka in i uppställningen.

Enligt uppgifter till Sportbladet går Tre Kronor nu också med Filip Gustavsson som förstemålvakt före Samuel Ersson.

Tre Kronor är klara gruppsegrare och får möta Finland eller Österrike i kvartsfinalen på torsdag.