The Bouncing Souls – arguably New Jersey’s most popular and certainly its longest-lived punk band – will launch their 30th anniversary celebration on Saturday, March 16, at Jersey City’s White Eagle Hall. Two weeks after the White Eagle Hall show, the Souls leave for an international tour that will keep them on the road and take them across the United States as well as Canada, the U.K., and Europe through December.

“There have certainly been times over the years when one of us might have thought about doing other things, but we just love what we do so much that, even if we do decide to take a break for a while, something will just happen and bring us back together,” guitarist Pete Steinkopf said. “So, we’ve never broken up, we’ve just taken time off. But even there, it never lasts as long as we talk about.

“Somebody will come up with a song and that will turn into a record, or we’ll get offered a tour, so it’s never pre-meditated,” he continued. ”One day we’ll just look up and be on tour and think, what happened? I thought we were taking a year off?”

The White Eagle Hall concert sold out days after it was announced, but fans who didn’t get tickets can still participate in the band’s landmark jubilee with a new EP, “Crucial Moments,” and a beautifully illustrated coffee table book that looks back at the group’s remarkable career.

In 1989, just out of high school and with no agenda other than having a good time, Steinkopf, singer Greg Attonito, bassist Bryan Kienlen, and drummer Shal Khichi rented a ramshackle house together in the college town of New Brunswick and became the Bouncing Souls. After a brief flirtation with hard funk and reggae, the band stumbled onto its trademark punk rock sound – catchy, energetic and wholeheartedly sincere – and never looked back.

From the start, the Bouncing Souls epitomized the “Do It Yourself” ethic at the heart of American punk rock.

If they couldn’t get a show, they’d put on one themselves, sometimes in their house, and invite all their friends and other bands. Without the funds to pay for logo’d T-shirts, they bought thrift-store castoffs and silk-screened their logo onto them. When no one else wanted to release their music, the Souls started their own record label, Chunksaah Records. And when they were ready to leave town and play for other audiences, they recruited one of their friends as manager and booked their own tours.

And in a perfect example of the phrase “a rising tide lifts all ships,” the friends who pitched in to help in those early years found their own successes, including a merchandising company and a booking agency.

Chunksaah Records has helped kick-start the careers of countless bands, and the Souls’ former manager/denmother Kate Hiltz (immortalized in the song “K8 Is Gr8”) now enjoys her dream job, running her own vegan diner in Philadelphia.

The only real change that’s marked the Souls’ long and consistent career has been the drummer’s chair. George Rebelo came on board in 2013, following Khichi (who left in 1999) and his successor, Michael McDermott.

“We have such a great support system around us,” Steinkopf said. “The other guys aren’t just in a band with me, they’re my best friends since high school. And we’re also surrounded by our best friends, who have all been involved in everything we do for so long. It’s really a family of friends. They not only help out with the business side of things, but they’ve all helped us get through some tough times. We’ve all had our moments where we’ve had to lean on each other. Luckily, we’ve always had that and always kept that. We respect everyone’s opinions and how they want to do things.

“It takes a village to keep a band together this long,” Steinkopf noted. “Except with us, we built our own village. There are so many of us who have stuck around so long.”

“Crucial Moments” marks the first new Bouncing Souls music since 2016’s “Simplicity” album, but that comes as no surprise. While they very much remain the Bouncing Souls, each member has carved out a career apart from the band.

Kienlen owns and operates a tattoo parlor in Asbury Park. Steinkopf has become a much-in-demand producer of young Jersey rock bands. And singer Greg Attonito and his wife, Shanti, have relocated to Idaho, where they write books and release music for children.

“You never really start out with a goal in mind when you sit down to write a song, but when we started working on this record, it really felt like that we were writing the kind of stuff that we hadn’t done in a long time, writing the kind of Bouncing Souls songs that people really connected to,” Steinkopf said. “And that’s not to say that people don’t like our newer songs, but there’s something special about that certain era that we were in (back in the ’90s) and these songs reminded us of that. And not just the music, but the spirit.”

“Crucial Moments,” the EP’s title track, started out as a song Steinkopf wrote about the loss of the band’s close friend Dave Franklin (of the band Vision), who died of a heart attack in 2017.

“That’s how it started, but it turned into a bigger thing,” Steinkopf said. “It turned into this song about all our friends and all the moments we really cherish. We’ve always tried to hold things that are dear close to our hearts, but sometimes things happen that remind you of how important that is. I think we’ve always written about things like that, but this collection of songs really captures that spirit.

“We all have our own things now, so when we get together as the Bouncing Souls, it’s because we love to do it. It’s not like we’re punching the clock like we were in the early 2000s, on tour all the time because that was the only way we were going to eat. Now when we get together, it’s for all the right reasons.”

The Bouncing Souls will be joined by Strike Anywhere! and Dead Bars at the White Eagle Hall show. For much of their national tour, Jersey City’s Crazy & The Brains and the Casualties will open. For information on the “Crucial Moments” EP and souvenir book, visit www.bouncingsouls.com.