“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.
It’s been six years since La Dispute released their last album, Panorama. Since then, the Michigan post-hardcore band—made up of Jordan Dreyer on vocals, Brad Vander Lugt on drums, Chad Morgan-Sterenberg and Corey Stroffolino on guitar, and Adam Vass on bass—dealt with the stagnance of the pandemic, celebrated the ten-year anniversaries of Wildlife and Rooms Of The House, and began working on No One Was Driving The Car. The fifth studio LP is the first entirely produced by the group, and it came together in Grand Rapids and Detroit, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines: “I think the change in environment was really helpful to breathing new life into the process each time we came back to it,” Dreyer says. Partly inspired by the 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, No One Was Driving The Car reckons with malaise in the shadow of the looming apocalypse, which has noticeably been worsened by the advancement of tech. The title comes from a quote from a police officer Dreyer read in a news article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, an absurd event which raises questions about the amount of control we have in our own lives. In fourteen dynamic tracks, the band grapples with the existential topic and the human need to find comfort and a sense of security in an existence where we’re often thrust into chaos without permission. Dreyer yells with a more primal sense and sings in a more refined way, and the guitars have a sharper edge than ever before. “As much as I don’t enjoy the creative process because it’s taxing and often not fun, I also think it’s the most fun that I ever have,” Dreyer contemplates. “It’s the revelations you make, the breakthroughs. It’s banging your head against a wall and suddenly something clicks in a way that feels almost divine, like it came from somewhere else.”