“Don’t Call It a Comeback” isn’t just the name of a song off Motion City Soundtrack’s 2003 debut I Am The Movie, it’s also an apt way to summarize the band’s mission statement. During Motion City Soundtrack’s initial run from 1997 - 2016, the Minneapolis-based group released six celebrated albums, toured the world countless times and achieved gold status for their hit single “Everything Is Alright.” After taking a three year hiatus, the band—vocalist/guitarist Justin Pierre, guitarist Joshua Cain, bassist Matt Taylor, keyboardist Jesse Johnson and drummer Tony Thaxton—started performing live again in 2019, but even the most optimistic fans didn’t necessarily expect a follow-up to 2015’s Panic Stations. “When we started conceptualizing the idea for this record, I was thinking about what we loved about doing this originally,” Cain explains. The result is The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World, an album that sees the band transmuting the last decade of life experiences into the most catchy songs of their career. Featuring cameos from Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump (who also co-wrote the song “Particle Physics”), Citizen’s Mat Kerekes and Deanna Belos of Sincere Engineer, the album sees the band reclaiming their crown as punk rock’s most accessible—and infectious—acts. However the most impressive aspect of The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World is the fact that instead of relying solely on nostalgia and album anniversary tours, Motion City Soundtrack continue to experiment outside their comfort zone. “ It's a very interesting thing to feel like we made the most important record of our career this late in the game,” Johnson explains. ““I think that if you look at a lot of our past records, it’s about ‘What’s wrong? What am I not getting right? Why do I feel fucking crazy? Why can’t I figure this out’… and I figured it out,” Pierre admits. “It’s almost like I felt I didn’t have an identity [in the past] and now by working through the hard stuff, I know who I am.” That sense of self-discovery is mirrored by the music, so when the final track fades out with just acoustic guitar and Pierre’s vocals it may be the conclusion of the album, but it’s the beginning of another chapter for Motion City Soundtrack’s collective journey.
There’s a phrase you’ll hear repeatedly when in the company of Split Chain: “The Chain does what it wants”. As mantras go, it’s used by the Bristol, UK quintet as a means of encapsulating the broad-minded, unconstrained creative freedom with which they approach their art, as well as a means through which to try to make sense of the sky-rocketing trajectory the band have found themselves on. Call it instinct, fate, divine intervention, whatever – the whims of ‘The Chain’ have led to a moment where one thing is abundantly clear: Split Chain are one of the hottest, zeitgeist-capturing new bands in the world. “Split Chain is something that none of us feel like we have any control of,” says frontman Bert Martinez-Cowles. “Split Chain simply does what it wants and what it needs.” It is at this juncture in Split Chain’s journey that debut album motionblur arrives. Described by Bert as “a coming of age story”, the album channels the conflicting and contradictory angst, excitement, joy and pain of growing up and discovering your true sense of self. motionblur presents a story that speaks to both Split Chain’s members’ personal experiences and those shared together in the past few dizzying years; a visceral, kaleidoscopic wall of sound where unsettling, disorientating confusion meets a fevered adrenaline-rush. motionblur is an album to experience, to feel, to engulf; it’s the blissful sense of euphoria that comes with drowning in its waves. There are shades of the quintet’s beloved Deftones, Superheaven, Narrowhead; bursts of nu-metal, and ripples of shoegaze. An emo melancholy hangs heavy. Grunge swerves in and out of view. Metal crackles under the surface. Its beauty lies in its skillfully crafted coalescence, no mean feat for an album so richly varied yet singularly focused. motionblur is at once a nostalgic homage to its 90s and early 00s cultural reference points while never once sounding anything less than thrillingly vibrant, a captivating depiction of rock’s burgeoning present and future.