When a band captures a perfect creative moment like The Menzingers did with their sixth album 2019’s Hello Exile, they find themselves in a position of having to measure up to it. While Hello Exile was a creative high mark met with deserved praise from music critics such as myself, its success in terms of dollars and cents was relative as it hit 89 on the Billboard Top 200 Charts.
Today, Taking Back Sunday: John Nolan (lead guitar, piano, vocals), Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass) and Mark O’Connell (drums), announced their eighth studio album ‘152’, set for release October 27, 2023, via Fantasy Records. Named for the section of road in North Carolina between Highpoint, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh where the band and their friends would meet up as teenagers⎯’152’ is the multl-platinum selling rock band’s first full-length offering since 2016’s ‘Tidal Wave’. To mark the occasion, Taking Back Sunday released a brand-new track, ‘S’old’, a fiery declaration of commitment and accountability.
It’s not often a touted Emo Pop-Punk Rock band manages to sprout up from the underground and into the veins of the mainstream pulse. The Manchester, UK duo behind Hot Milk have quickly honed in their style within their short four-year tenure, as evident by their politically fueled hit single ‘Candy Coated Lie$’ which garnished over 17M Spotify streams. No different, their debut album A Call To The Void (Music For Nations) doesn’t pull a single punch.
For the past seven years, Spanish Love Songs have made a reputation for themselves across their previous three albums for creating some of the most emotionally powerful music, a feat that, with the release of their fourth album No Joy (Pure Noise Records), the punk quintet achieved yet again.
Ever since their debut album, Feel Something, blew up in 2017, the massive surge of dedicated fans have held Southern California post-hardcore and emo band Movements to a high standard when it comes to follow-up material. As the group grows older, their music continues to grow with them, as made evident with their 2020 release No Good Left To Give, and now their third full-length album, RUCKUS! (Fearless Records). While the band is no longer the same sad boys they started out as, there are still pieces of their old selves mixed into their new, matured evolution, with RUCKUS! about to elicit a peculiar balance of dancing, moshing, and crying.
On July 29th, fans eagerly gathered in Phoenix, Arizona’s Financial Theater for Yellowcard’s highly-awaited comeback tour which celebrated 20 years since the release of their freshman album Ocean Avenue. Needless to say, after a long hiatus, the fans expected a night filled with nostalgia, energy, and powerful performances from all the bands that came together in support of this tour.
The Metal, and by extension Rock community has been one more open with mental health struggles over recent years. Often the roots of the music come from trauma, grief, or pain. Hail The Sun have been such a band who up to this point have gained the most of their insight into making their music from these more dark places.
Evergreen (Hopeless Records) is a very ambitious album and frankly by far the most thematically well-rounded and best effort from Pvris yet. Lyndsey Gerd Gunnulfsen has seamlessly planted a flag on the moon here, showing it was her that made this project special all along. Not only a queer champion, Gunnulfsen is a top-notch creator and performer who can back it up with grade-A material with startling philosophical depth amidst the beats and hooks.
From the album title alone, it is evident that The Used are just as sincere in their art as they’ve always been over the last two decades. Nine albums deep into their career, the emo quartet have graced us with the blunt Toxic Positivity (Hassle Records). The record calls out the detrimental mindset of suppressing negative emotions, addressing how it worsens one’s mental health over time due to ignored bottled-up feelings.
New Jersey is a rock, emo, and pop-punk music mecca, so it comes as no surprise that rock/pop-punk champs Can’t Swim would hail from the same. They’ve dabbled in a couple of genres on past albums like hardcore and indie before settling into more of the pop-punk vein which fits like a glove for the group. The quartet is gearing up for the release of their fourth album, Thanks But No Thanks (Pure Noise) as it drops the same day as their US-wide tour kick-off supporting Free Throw.