The Offspring: Garden Grove’s Unlikely Stars

When the Offspring’s new album, “Ixnay on the Hombre,” hits stores Tuesday, the Garden Grove punk band will begin a new chapter in what may be the most unlikely rock success story of the ‘90s.

The release also sets up the unprecedented possibility that one Orange County band will knock another off the top of the national album charts. As of this week, “Tragic Kingdom,” the breakthrough album by Anaheim’s No Doubt, had logged its eighth straight week at No. 1 in Billboard.

During the first 10 years of its career, the Offspring sold fewer than 50,000 albums. But the band exploded in 1994 with its third album, “Smash,” which sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. That’s a nearly unrivaled achievement for a band playing punk, the raw, aggressive brand of rock that delights in thumbing its nose at authority, other types of music and anything that’s not punk.

As a result, the Offspring, along with the Bay Area’s Green Day, brought punk rock off the fringe and into the pop mainstream.

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