Let There Be COCKS

The L.A. gay punk rockers "hang ten" with their new album Endless Hummer.

Jun 09, 2026

THE COCKS: Jason “Halo” Halogen, Mike McCormick, Tchad Drats and Zsa.

I’ve been a fan of gay punk purveyors THE COCKS ever since 2021, when they burst out of Los Angeles (and their trousers) with Loads of Fun, their loud n’ lusty debut album.

Sure, I’d known COCKS frontman Zsa (also known as Jay Sosnicki) since the turn of the millennium, when we both worked at the late, lamented MusicBlitz website — but even without that personal connection, my perpetually-adolescent brain would have found hook-filled, smut-caked rockers like “Taking One for the Team,” “Cheeseburgers & Dick” and “Jerry Cantrell” (the latter being the only known musical tribute to a grunge icon’s package) utterly irresistible.

And now, five years later, THE COCKS are back with a new album — Endless Hummer, currently available on most streaming services — and a new, even more conceptual shtick. Recognizing that just being an ass-slamming rock n’ roll band with a seemingly endless supply of raunchy gay-themed glam-punk anthems isn’t enough to make anyone pay attention in this oversaturated day and age, THE COCKS have been steadily releasing hilariously creative videos to accompany new songs like “Brotein,” “Sugar on the Rim” and “Being a F*g (In a RNR Band)”.

Each clip comes off like a mini-episode from a long-lost TV sitcom in which the four COCKS — Zsa, guitarist Tchad Drats, bassist Jason “Halo” Halogen and drummer Mike McCormick — live together at a run-down pad in Reseda, bicker incessantly, occasionally blast off into outer space, and inspire the creation of their own action figures and play set.

That Zsa is the only member of THE COCKS who is actually gay never seems to be an issue or, er, bone of contention within the band — everyone’s open-minded and enthusiastically along for the ride, and that sense of dysfunctional-yet-supportive brotherhood is one of the things that makes THE COCKS so oddly endearing. As Zsa puts it with a laugh, “The straight guys have no problem whatsoever with singing songs about sucking dick.”

While THE COCKS stay true to their original short n’ sweet approach on the new album, keeping all of Endless Hummer’s songs under the three-minute mark, the record still finds them branching out a bit musically. They bust out some acoustic guitars and surf sounds alongside the rampant Ramones, Motörhead and Sunset Strip hair-metal influences, and the lads even indulge themselves in a majestic instrumental called “Bonehenge” — though they head off any risk of perceived pretentiousness by ending it after 30 seconds. In any case, the whole thing is a total blast from stem to stern; and while Endless Hummer makes a perfect party soundtrack for Pride Month, there’s no reason not to crank it all year long.

Zsa and I recently caught up by phone to talk about where THE COCKS have been, and where they’re going…

JTL: Did you already have the COCKS concept together when you started the band? Or did the band just kind of morph into it?

ZSA: We sort of morphed into it. The original guitar player and I, we did music for a short film that I did, and I’d written a song called “God Gives Notice,” because that was what the little short was about. But after we did that first song, we were like, “This is kind of fun. Let’s spend some time just coming up with a bunch of songs; if we like them, we’ll put a band together.”

And that’s what happened. The weird thing was that, once we pulled the group together, after about two or three rehearsals everybody was looking at each other like, “This is like, viable, right? This is the best band I’ve ever been in!” [laughs]

But you’re not just a great band — you’re also an amusing collection of characters.

Yeah — the whole “Monkees” component, that also came about organically, just because everybody in the band is super-duper crazy and damaged in their own way. Like Mike, our drummer, he really is that crazy, neurotic guy, our guitarist Tchad is kind of a kamikaze libertine, and our bassist Halo and I have this total love-hate relationship. Everyone really is those characters, and we’re all having a lot of fun just blowing it up, because it’s a way to have fun and extend the band beyond just the music. But also it’s a way of dealing with the problems that we have with each other by laughing at them.

Which is pretty genius, because then you’re using those problems creatively instead of letting them fester and compound.

And in the world we live in now, unfortunately, you can’t just make a record — you have to make “content”. And if we have to live in that world, then we may as well be super-creative and fun about it. So that’s where that “Monkees” component kind of spun out. We’ve got something that’s very unique, which I think has a wider appeal than some people think it would have, but there are some limiting things about it: Not everyone’s going to want to listen to songs about sucking dick, and we’re not young, we’re not cute. [laughs]

So it’s important for me to have this other component to get us out there in ways that the music and the live shows can’t do by themselves. And that’s kind of borne fruit; like, our YouTube channel is doing better and better, just because people respond to these goofy videos. In fact, I’m starting to have people hitting me up and saying, “Do you want to play this show?” based on our videos. So we’re making incremental progress, and earning one new fan at a time.

You and I have known each other for over 25 years now. For most of that time, I thought of you as a musician who just happened to be gay, but THE COCKS are your first band where you’re really amplifying that aspect of yourself. Was it freeing to be able to finally do that?

Actually, I never really thought about that before; but yeah, it was super-freeing in a way. In Monarch, the last band I was in, that was kind of a gothic country thing, and I wrote a song that was a pretty direct statement of male-to-male love, but it wasn’t as overt as this. And then, of course, I grew up in a world where if you’re a gay person in a rock band, you could maybe slip those things into the lyrics, but you could never be over-the-top about it. So when we set this thing up as something that was going to be overtly gay, that was incredibly freeing; but also I liked that we were putting out it there that we’re a band that only has one gay member, but all the straight guys have no problem whatsoever singing songs about sucking dick. [laughs]

At the first show we played, we were all expecting to get pelted with rocks and garbage, but the straight people really got into it. Because it's celebratory music and it's fun and it's funny; but the band also kicks ass, and that kind of gives permission to that uptight dude in the back of the room with his arms crossed to just fully get into the spirit of it. But yeah, it was incredibly freeing to be able to do this, and I guess that’s really kind of a reflection of the times we live in.

I know — I was thinking about how, back when we were teenagers, there would be all these schoolyard arguments over whether or not Rob Halford or Freddie Mercury were gay. I was pretty sure they were, but you still had to read between the lines sometimes to understand what they were singing about.

What’s that lyric from Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive”? — “Bound to deliver as you give and I collect/Squealing impassioned as the rod of steel injects!” I did an interview with Halford around the time you and I were working together. He had just come out, like, a couple years before, and he was like, “The way I was dressed on stage, the lyrics, how did people not know?” [laughs]

But yeah, it's awesome that we live in a world where people don't give a shit — I mean, certainly there are people who still give a shit, but it's just been normalized, which is great, and as it should be.

Musically, who are THE COCKS’ main influences?

Early on, it was the Ramones and Turbonegro, and absolutely Motörhead. When we first started this thing, we were like, “Let’s just be loud and fast and dumb!” Two-minute songs, that was the absolute template — anything over two minutes, we would laugh and call it prog-rock. [laughs]

With this new album, we kept the soul of the music while expanding upon the idea of it. I was super-duper into listening to a lot of Zappa and Beach Boys, and there were a couple of opportunities there to like do those little homages, like “California Boys” and “Endless Hummer” — Halo, who is like my prime collaborator, talked me into that one, because that was originally just an acoustic number called “Who’s Gonna Suck My Dick?” The guys really wanted to do it, and I was like, “No, I hate it, it’s too on the nose, it’s not clever.”

But Jason and I had been talking about doing like a Beach Boys-style song, so he was like, “Why don’t we make this a surf tune?” He laid down the track, and it was literally one of those things where, in one night, we just laid down the vocal and just started making harmonies. We were like, “Yeah that’s it — now this is worth doing!”

Same thing with “California Boys” — I mean, there’s absolutely some Baby Snakes in that. The goal for this album was like, “All right, we’re a California band, and we’re specifically in LA band. So what’s the record we would want to hear that, 30 years from now, we could say stands up with The Doors and The Mothers and all the best LA music that we love?”

I’ve seen a lot of YouTube comments where people are like, “Turbonegro already did this.” How do you respond to that?

I love Turbonegro, but I think people say that mainly because of my sailor hat. Because as much as I love them, and I feel like they’re an influence, it’s more of like an attitude influence; I don’t think we sound like them in any way, shape, or form. That said, I’ll go to my grave saying Scandinavian Leather is one of the best albums of its era.

You’ll get no argument from me on that one. So, what’s up next for THE COCKS?

More videos, more fun. The goal we’re working on with the team we’ve pulled together is to do something very different with every video. We’re currently working on for the song “Why Can I Remember (What You Won’t Forget)” — we’re going for a guerilla-style handheld iPhone thing, kind of like that Aerosmith video for “Let The Music Do The Talking”. And then in the fall, we’re going to do a big, full-on Hollywood musical production for “Sex in Prison”. Kind of our Jailhouse Cock, you know what I mean? [laughs]

We’re also going to do a string of West Coast shows in late fall, and we’re hoping to keep that going into the spring. Our publicist keeps telling us there’s tons of rock clubs in the south, and he really thinks we can do a lot for ourselves there, presuming we don’t get killed. [laughs] And I’m hoping, like, maybe by this time next year, we can put out a live album. I would love to do one that stands up with like Budokan, Kiss Alive and Unleashed in the East as a sort of perfectly-constructed ersatz live album that’s recorded in the studio, but seems to be a live experience, and really captures the essence of what you’re about live…

Sounds like you guys are gonna be hitting it hard, so to speak.

Yeah, well — time is ticking, and I’ve been working on focusing on what’s really important to me. I’m embracing 100% that I’m not gonna stop doing this thing with THE COCKS, but I have completely made my peace with the fact that it may never pay the bills. And that’s okay, because I just have so much goddamn fun doing it — and that has to be enough, because that may be all I get.