“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.
late night drive home have never known a world without internet — without access to the endless stream of joy, sorrow, and titillation that we all tune in and tune out to on the daily. In many ways, the guys can’t extricate themselves from that reality, but they’re trying to grapple with it. The culmination of that, then, is the buoyant yet ominous as I watch my life online, the band’s debut album on Epitaph. “The record is a critique and a meta representation of the current online landscape: a whole new world or giant united country that connects us between cities, forcing us to be online. Instant gratification is at our fingertips — likes, follows, and entertainment a click away,” says guitarist Juan “Ockz” Vargas. “It shows the listener how we grew up in the early days of peak internet — how we saw it all unfold. We want to give our perspective on the internet while creating art alongside it.” late night drive home was born in El Paso, Texas, and Chaparral, New Mexico, hardworking communities where the collars were mostly blue — a quality that the band would bring to their music as self-taught craftsmen. Comprising guitarist Juan “Ockz” Vargas, singer Andre Portillo, drummer Brian Dolan, and bassist Freddy Baca, the entirely self-taught quartet released their first EP as a full band, 2021’s Am I sinking or Am I swimming?, and blew up with the single “Stress Relief,” a blast of early-Aughts indie that racked in tens of millions of streams. Their first pull compilation of songs, How Are We Feeling? dropped in 2022, and after signing with Epitaph in 2023 — and releasing 2024’s grunge-inspired EP I'll remember you for the same feeling you gave me as i slept — they found themselves playing stages their indie idols previously shredded: Coachella, Shaky Knees, Austin City Limits, and Kilby Block Party. Since the end of the pandemic, though, the band has been dreaming up as I watch my life online. “Sonically the record is expertly produced — it was the first work we put out that was recorded in professional studios and not our bedrooms,” Vargas says about working with producer Sonny Diperri. “Topically, the album is about the internet. As a Gen-Z band, we want to give an accurate representation of how it feels to be always online. Our generation is forced to care so much about its online identity, it’s like ‘your profile is as important as your outfit.’” The resulting suite of tracks is a series of online vignettes that hammers home the band’s message: the photos on your phone shouldn’t be your identity; your posts aren’t your inner monologue.