Five Eight is a legendary rock band from Athens, Georgia. They’ve played with R.E.M. and The Ramones and Cheap Trick and all your favorite alt-rock and post-punk bands from the 1990s. They were perpetually the “next big thing” in the wake of Nirvana’s huge success and they did many of the right things to follow that path, but were ultimately disappointed that no record labels successfully broke them nationally. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise in several ways: they are all still alive 38 years later, they are all still friends and bandmates, and they are making some of the best music of their lives.
While a career in rock n’ roll was certainly a dream of theirs, these are not guys who could ever stop playing music, no matter the situation. So they kept their nose to the grindstone and kept writing emotionally gripping songs about characters on the edge of life and death, all the while keeping a sense of humor about it and growing more and more grateful to still be here and still so connected to each other. These guys are grinding it out in a club or studio or basement *today* and that is its own reward. They have stuck with it so long that they’ve redefined success and it doesn’t involve being the next big thing. And those with this secret knowledge — that Five Eight has re-contextualized almost 40 years of struggle and sweat and tears and joy and the magic of rock music— are the lucky ones.
The 2024 release of the feature documentary WEIRDO: THE STORY OF FIVE EIGHT — currently touring one city at a time with the band always doing Q&A and playing a rock show in the room afterward — has put some recent wind in their sails. Paste Magazine called it "A gripping story of one of the best live bands to come out of Athens, full of fantastic music and visuals." The band has a new record, tentatively titled Help a Sinner, in the can. The recent release of their 2025 single “Take Me to the Skate Park” — an accidental cousin to Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” and Five Eight’s most punk rock song ever released — was a big hit at SXSW this past March, causing Rolling Stone to call them “Vibrant and exciting. The kind of rock you play when you’re committed to the game for life.” They never “made it,” but they made it.