Enema Of The State was a crucial album to a lot of us growing up, and Madi Diaz is no exception. Last month the Los Angeles singer-songwriter released her new album Fatal Optimist, but it turns out she was working on another project around the same time: a track-by-track reimagining of Blink-182’s 1999 classic. Diaz’s version is called Enema Of The Garden State — she recorded it in New Jersey — and it’s exclusively available on Bandcamp, via which proceeds are going to the Defending Our Neighbors Fund.
Enema Of The Garden State began as a “fun light exercise” in the studio while Diaz was recording Fatal Optimist. “Every morning to warm up in the studio, producer and engineer Andrew Maury would set up some mics and turn on the four track and let me just play around,” Diaz says in the Bandcamp notes. “I had been listening to [Enema Of The State] obsessively once again (it’s almost a seasonal occurrence with certain records) on my jogs and I wanted to see if I could just run these songs and let the nostalgia drive my memory for the lyrics and tear through a punky acoustic arrangement. No planning, no overthinking, no analyzing allowed, just ripping into the songs. It was just pure fun pure joy.”
Over time, those lighthearted Blink-182 jam sessions got Diaz thinking about how ironically appropriate the title Enema Of The State is in 2025, “when it feels like we really need to flush the system and give our whole government a health check/gut check.” Thus she decided to donate all the proceeds to Defending Our Neighbors Fund, a rapid-response non-profit that provides legal and financial support to immigrant families as ongoing ICE raids unlawfully and violently tear them apart. You have to buy the album on Bandcamp to hear it in full, but you can listen to Diaz’s acoustic covers of “Don’t Leave Me” and “Anthem” below.
Enema Of The Garden State is out now.
