Head to the AP Store to seize blue vinyl of Higher Days and different Yellowcard merch. Plus, see all of their upcoming tour dates right here.
“What number of bands can say they’ve a rock ’n’ roll violin from the 1600s?” Sean Mackin asks me. Not all questions have simple solutions, however this one does — for scene members and past, all indicators level to Florida pop-punk outfit Yellowcard. Although thought-about a foundational participant in what would turn out to be pop punk’s first wave, again in Jacksonville in ‘97, Yellowcard had been fashioned as a hardcore group. However together with the millennium got here change — in lineup, musical type, and, quickly after, a swift new trajectory. In 2000, with Ryan Key as lead singer and guitarist, and Mackin as full-time violinist, they had been solely a few years from an album that’s permeated common tradition since its 2003 launch, Ocean Avenue. Simply the primary single, “Method Away,” alone would make its manner from TRL onto reveals Pepsi Smash and The O.C., and even the SSX and Madden NFL 2004 video video games. That album would additionally land them their first journal cowl — Various Press, March 2004. Twenty-one years later, they’re gracing the quilt as soon as once more.
Learn extra: 10 criminally underrated blink-182 songs
It’s late Might of 2025, and I’m standing within the shadow of a 12-foot-tall blink-182 bunny statue, flanked by Floridians. It makes extra sense than it sounds. The rabbit, actually, is the unofficial warden of Travis Barker’s famed Woodland Hills studio, the place Yellowcard and Barker spent the final yr constructing an album from the “floor up.” The album, Higher Days, is an enormous deal. It’s the band’s first full-length in almost a decade — a decade throughout which, in 2017, the band fairly actually broke up. And once they stated goodbye, it wasn’t a Gene Simmons goodbye; they meant it. “Our final present was March 25, 2017 at Home of Blues Anaheim. There was a interval on the finish of the sentence, the door was closed, it was the tip. I really consider all of us felt there was no likelihood that we’d ever make music collectively once more,” Key tells me, wide-eyed, sitting in Barker’s drum room. “We had put a lot thought into how we had been stepping away from the band on our personal phrases. The explanations had been legitimate, and the explanations had been our personal. We made the choice collectively. I believe we did one thing actually lovely ultimately, by creating that closing tour. Plus, it was probably the most profitable tour we had executed in a decade. It went higher than we might have ever imagined. However there was, ready within the wings, individuals who believed that sometime these wounds are going to heal, and Yellowcard will probably be again.”
Household and different initiatives populated the years that adopted. However no matter crystals these folks had been charging, whichever chakra they’d tapped, appeared to have labored. “We bought a telephone name in late 2021. I believe it was about enjoying Riot Fest in Chicago. We began speaking about that in mid-2022, and the present was going to be in September of 2022. Even that, we went in with, ‘Let’s simply see the way it goes.’ There have been no future plans, definitely not making an album with Travis Barker and all the wild issues which have occurred since that night time in Chicago.”
After the fest, the actual therapeutic started. That yr, the band reconciled to have a good time Ocean Avenue’s twentieth anniversary, embarking on a world tour to help it. The seed of recent music was planted, although in nascent phases. The prospect of a brand new inventive period, stuffed with nuanced adjustments and challenges, was but to unfold. The band, who at all times worth intentionality and endurance now greater than ever, agreed that making a brand new album was futile until it was the very best of their profession. “We’ve actually taken a variety of time to verify we had the precise songs and that for everyone, this report was going to have the burden and scope that it wanted to. If we’re going to make a full-length, it must matter.” They refused to push, or rush, the method. And in permitting themselves that area, the time to heal, and to search out stability between the previous and current — for the primary time, Yellowcard requested for assist. “Look, I hearken to ambient electronica and movie scores,” says Key, laughing. “At my age, placing the hat again on and actually stepping into rock ’n’ roll and pop punk, the music that we do finest collectively… I felt like, for the primary time in our profession, I used to be open to getting some assist.” Mackin provides, “However we wished our folks, our associates, folks that work with the band we all know.”
Daniel Rojas
Thus, Barker was introduced into the fold. As they toyed with the idea of collaboration, guitarist Ryan Mendez reached out to Nick Lengthy — a buddy and prolific songwriter who had made hits with King Princess, and naturally, blink-182. I requested Barker the way it wound up on his plate, and ever so casually, the long-lasting drummer and producer recollects, “My buddy Nick was doing a day with them, and I had a day! So I used to be like, ‘I’ll bounce in.’ Didn’t actually know what I used to be doing, however he’s one among my finest associates. So I used to be in for the concept of working collectively for the day.” And with the identical serendipity of Yellowcard’s complete arc since reuniting, it fell collectively from there. “We had a extremely good time the primary day we labored collectively, and my subsequent day opened up randomly, so we bought in once more, and we did one other music the following day. From there, it was such a simple undertaking and straightforward group of fellows to make music with. It was everybody within the band. It was energetic and actually part of every little thing within the studio. Subsequent factor you already know, we had been getting again within the studio, and we had been scheduling weeks to work with one another and report a whole album.”
For every artist he works with, whether or not on the label facet with DTA, as producer with mgk or blink-182, at the same time as a drummer — for which his credit are too lengthy and numerous to summarize — Barker tells me his strategy is completely different. “However with [Yellowcard], it was actually specializing in the songs, what I believed they wanted for his or her album, and subjects that had been honest to them to put in writing about. Then I get into tempos and kinds of songs and every little thing like that.” An enormous a part of his follow, he says, is effecting change. “It was determining how the band works first, who often writes lyrics, who often comes up with music concepts, go alongside these strains of what they’re used to — after which break some habits 1,000%. Whether or not it’s like, ‘I don’t often sing until 4 within the afternoon,’ and I’m like, ‘Effectively, we’re going to sing proper after we are available tomorrow.’ Ryan was singing increased and stronger than I’ve ever heard him sing on some other albums, as soon as I began listening and breaking folks out of the molds they’re used to. We additionally had large breakthroughs after we’d do stuff like that, simply writing a music from scratch. There weren’t actually concepts mendacity round. For probably the most half, it was like, ‘How are we feeling immediately? What can we need to write about?’ That’s how a lot of the songs would begin.”
Daniel Rojas
For the band, they felt that dam break, too. As soon as the songs began to take form, Key tells me he realized shortly “how particular what we had been doing was, how purely Yellowcard this sound is. It was inspiring.” However the problem had been in getting there, and sustaining that course and velocity regardless of any insecurities that may come up. The stress they’d placed on themselves to create “the very best album of their profession, after Ocean Avenue” would have anybody feeling just a little shaky. “Not overthinking it,” Key says, “That was the arduous half. The expectation of this area [being] the place we need to make the very best Yellowcard songs, simply out of nowhere… Hey, no stress! That is what we had been making an attempt to do day by day. That half was the toughest.” For Key, these challenges run deep. “At the start of the method, I actually was struggling,” he shares. “Struggling to search out my footing and discover confidence and really feel like I belonged right here — amongst all of this, working with Travis… I used to be feeling a variety of impostor syndrome. I’ve at all times struggled with that in my profession, although, at a number of completely different factors. I believe after we’ve been extra profitable, I can are likely to go to a spot that I really feel like I’m not ok, and that may actually eat me up. As soon as I ripped that Band-Help off and was simply dedicated, we addressed that problem — strolling into this overwhelming expertise, pondering, ‘We don’t have something written, however it needs to be superb.’”
However Mackin makes certain so as to add, “The stress ended up being actually useful. That may be daunting. I believe coming full circle, getting to observe it, on the point of launch new songs once more, has been tremendous optimistic.” It’s a reminder that this band, for the reason that begin, have been uniquely expert at flipping negatives on their head. In answering my question about hurdles and challenges, the group arrived at gratitude.
Daniel Rojas
From the early aughts to the 2010s, for Yellowcard and lots of others, their course of modified in accordance with know-how, and with life. The turnaround expectations for a report had sped up considerably. Every of the 4 band members lives in several states, they usually fell right into a follow of working with instrumental demos, handed round for suggestions earlier than they’d hit the studio. Key explains, “In a extremely distinctive and attention-grabbing manner, [this collaboration] truly introduced us all the way in which again to the way in which we initially wrote songs collectively as a band…The way in which we used to do it after we had been younger and bright-eyed, heading to California in our van. We’d write a music behind the van. We’d write a music on the ground in the lounge. We’d write a music within the dressing room at a bar that we had been enjoying, a storage closet in a bar we had been enjoying. Then we bought away from that for lots of causes that made sense to get away from it. We weren’t all collectively. We had been very hardly ever all collectively after a sure level in our profession…This introduced us into the room with nothing to begin with. Only a recent day, recent minds, recent thought.”
There’s been no dearth of anniversary excursions or nostalgia festivals over the previous few years. Balancing the previous and the current is confirmed to be an artwork, not a science, for bands within the scene. Finally yr’s When We Have been Younger competition, I sat backstage with a slew of bands, who felt understandably torn in regards to the thought of revisiting their teenage years or leaning too closely on their previous success. My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero identified, “What you’re doing is putting your self in a timeline that’s already handed. However repeatedly transferring ahead and taking possibilities, that’s simpler stated than executed, proper?” Barker, one of many starring stalwarts within the scene, retains this enigma high of thoughts. It’s part of his manufacturing and government manufacturing kinds. “I’m an enormous fan of constructing brother and sister data to data that we already write, issues that may very well be grouped collectively,” Barker explains. “But it surely’s additionally about ensuring we don’t repeat issues that we’ve executed earlier than, perhaps within the band’s profession and even on this album, whether or not it’s a music association, a lyric, being actually cautious of stuff like that.”
For a band like Yellowcard, followers have remained the very best on their precedence listing via all of it. Serving their viewers the sound they’ve come to like is important, however the objective is in seeing that model of themselves via the lens of who they’re immediately. “We did this magical factor that you just attempt to do, however you additionally attempt to keep away from,” Key explains. “You attempt to seize this unique power and this unique sound, the core sound of the band from again within the day, however you additionally attempt to keep away from that since you don’t need it to sound pressured, and also you don’t need to sound such as you’re in your 40s making an attempt to sound such as you’re in your 20s. It’s a extremely unusual place to be as a songwriter making an attempt to seize this nostalgia, but additionally making an attempt to do issues which are new and recent. However I really consider with Higher Days, we captured the core sound of Yellowcard in probably the most pure manner with out it sounding pressured in any manner.”
With two singles out already as proof, the album’s title observe and “actually i,” it’s arduous to disagree. There’s no easing in. The previous is addictively catchy, chock-full of highly effective riffs, tremendous potent vocals. There are whispers of Lights and Sounds, which take new form in opposition to the backdrop of Barker’s shinier manufacturing type and signature drumming. “For me, feeling like a fish out of water, as I’ve touched on, Travis was in a position to encourage a confidence in me that I used to be simply terrified that I wasn’t going to have the ability to discover. With out query, this appears like the very best vocal efficiency I’ve ever delivered,” Key gushes. “I’m not giving myself the credit score for that. I believe his involvement within the course of and his help and encouragement had been every little thing you need from a producer.” Their second single, which arrived alongside “Higher Days” in late Might, sees Mackin’s 1600s Italian violin actually sing. The observe feels prefer it’s been mendacity on Ocean Avenue’s chopping room ground for all these years. “Shout out to Eric at Benning Violins,” Mackin says, grinning, although he’s additionally valued the route Barker has taken the band. “He is aware of finest. From there, it’s let’s go and get the very best take of that attainable. It simply impressed us all to attempt to be that subsequent degree model of ourselves.”
Daniel Rojas
Barker sums up the album in a number of phrases, neatly. “Quick, emotional, honest. There are a variety of delicate subjects written about on the album, and that’s what makes the album so particular.” It’s not solely an astute manner of describing an album they’ve put a lot of themselves into, however of Yellowcard themselves. Within the afternoon spent collectively, I noticed nothing however earnestness, humility, and a pinch-me perspective from the band, bursting with gratitude for the possibility to have made music collectively once more, with Barker by their facet, and to be sharing about it with us and our readers.
Of their 2004 AP cowl story, Mackin says, “I’m not imagined to be right here. I’m imagined to be sitting behind an orchestra someplace, or giving youngsters music classes. So I’m very grateful. We’re all having such a superb time doing what we’re doing, and fortunately, the selections we’ve made have given us some fairly superb outcomes.” Not each band would, or ought to, stand by statements they made 20-odd years in the past. However what’s been on the coronary heart of Yellowcard for the reason that earliest days stays there. And it’s as felt in Higher Days because it was again in ’03 on Ocean Avenue. “I began this report as one model of myself and got here out the opposite facet modified…” Key says. “I got here out of it writing songs like I used to be 19 once more.”
Daniel Rojas
