Tracklist

1. Better Days
2. Take What You Want
3. Love Letters Lost (feat. Matt Skiba)
4. honestly i
5. You Broke Me Too (feat. Avril Lavigne)
6. City of Angels
7. Bedroom Posters
8. Skin Scraped
9. Barely Alive
10. Big Blue Eyes

Thoughts

Mr C recommended this to me, I'd never heard of the band before. This is their first album in nearly a decade, which goes some way to explain that, because as soon as I started listening, I couldn't believe I'd missed out on this! A deluxe version was released this month which is why we thought it was brand new, but the original actually came out in 2025.

It's pop punk, pure teenage angst, even though it's not coming from teenagers anymore. Bedroom Posters is about revisiting your childhood home and dealing with your family as you all get older: "Tear down my bedroom posters / Don't say those days are over." It's such a vivid image to me, knowing how many posters I had on my teenage bedroom walls! There's a moment with rapid drumming underneath, tinkling glockenspiel on top and the singer yelling "Tear it all down when I'm gone" on repeat. It's giving big 'man rages at child's toy' energy. It shouldn't work, but it really does.

The album is high energy most of the way through, although the final two songs are slower. We're not talking full-on ballads here. Barely Alive and Big Blue Eyes are still pop punk enough to keep it from being a sagging end.

The easy comparison here is Avril Lavigne - it's the same style just through a male lens with a rock group backing. For me, Avril defined modern pop punk, and then returned as a 'grown up' with Love Sux which is exactly what this album has done. She guests on You Broke Me Too in the middle of the album, which is a neat extra.

I absolutely loved this, it's nostalgic but not maudlin, and an album that can just sweep you up and put you down again 30 minutes later is immediately getting a replay. It's a 5 out of 5.

Rating: 5 / 5