Kevin Bronson on February 6th, 2009

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It’s old-school punk meets new-school business model: The new album from Orange County veterans T.S.O.L., released in January, is available for free. Not surprisingly, the album is titled “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Free Downloads.” Marking the 30th anniversary of the band founded as True Sounds of Liberty, T.S.O.L.’s 16th album comes courtesy of Costa Mesa-based clothing and lifestyle company Hurley.

Record labels are done, frontman Jack Grisham explains in short videos on the band’s MySpace page, encouraging fans who grab the album to send a donation to one of its favorite charities (such as the Midnight Mission, Surfrider Foundation, Orangewood Foundation, SPCA and the Orange County Food Bank). In a phone interview, keyboardist Greg Kuehn describes how quickly the project happened:

“Bob (Hurley) had known some of the guys in the band since they were kids. It was like, ‘Forget about a record deal, just give us a little money from your marketing budget and we’ll make an album,'” Kuehn says. “For a corporation, Hurley is about as laid-back as it gets, so we had no worries.”

The deal was struck in late November. Guitarist Ron Emory, who now lives in Iowa, came west in December. The band wrote the whole album in seven days and recorded it at Hurley’s studio (the process was captured live via webcams) in under a week, just before Christmas. The finished product, which finds T.S.O.L. at perhaps its most sonically diverse, was available Jan. 9.

Kuehn says it was a win-win deal deal for both parties – Hurley getting the publicity and traffic from some 20,000 downloads in the first couple of weeks, and the band owning the master recordings for the album.

||| Download or stream: “The Pain That We Go Through” [audio:http://www.mediafire.com/file/hykqntmlvun/TSOL_The Pain That We Go Through.mp3]

||| Download the album: “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Free Downloads.”

||| Live: T.S.O.L. plays Saturday at Coconuts in Dana Point and Sunday at the Echoplex.