Over the past few years, actually nearly a decade if you were really, truly deeply entrenched in the scene, indie skater-punk music has flourished in Los Angeles, making it one of the major music hubs for the genre. One of the cooler new bands to emerge in the past year and a half from the city’s east side is Criminal Hygiene.

The band formed over a way that any wise young musician would decide to start playing music: over burgers and beers. Founding members Michael Fiore and James Pratley Watson, who were both students at USC at the time, were chompin’ on double bacon cheeseburgers at lunch in Olympian Family Restaurant in South Los Angeles when Fiore simply said, “Let’s record some music.” Not surprisingly, Watson agreed, but had to put things in perspective before they continued: “Let’s get drunk first.”

From there, the then college seniors began to focus only on their new band, often times skipping classes to write and record music, while sucking down a few beers in the process. With the addition of Sean “Bird Man” Erickson to helm the drumming duties, the band has kicked into another gear, literally and figuratively.

Playing shows around town has built the trio a steady following amongst the garage rock/skater punk community. The band channels their sound from a blend of The Replacements and ‘90s rock (the good kind of course), which is the ying to their punk yang. Their shows have been known to escalate and become rowdy, good time events even when they devolve into the typical anarchic punk shows, which means lots of mayhem and sometimes relatively unorganized chaos. But so goes the life of a band, besides, it isn’t very rock or punk to conform to the rules.

Criminal Hygiene has a new album, the kinda, sorta self-titled CRMNL HYGNE, which has earned the band accolades. Comparisons to another site fave, FIDLAR, are inevitable, but that would be as lazy in comparing two quarterbacks from the same school or ethnicity. Outside of a band like Nirvana or The Police, trios generally have trouble breaking through to a wider audience. But this band is as authentic as they come, after all what other band would cut class, decide to form over burgers and brews, make an album of 17 songs that clocks in at around 40 minutes and live to tell their story? Skate-punks that’s who and judging by their formation, their songs and the hype surrounding their live shows, Criminal Hygiene are not only a band on the rise, but could be a sleeper band to emerge from Los Angeles this year.