The Depression Trilogy: How the Wonder Years Became the Voice of a Generation

a very specific subset of a generation composed of a messy mix of hardcore kids, pop-punk kids, and emo kids, but that would have been too much of a mouthful

The late 2000s and early 2010s saw the rise of a pop-punk scene that was deeply conscious of its status as pop-punk. This was a cohort of bands that was, in many ways, directly descended from the mid-2000s hardcore scene, but instead of embracing their orthodoxy and aesthetic, they deliberately tweaked it, simultaneously mocking and paying tribute to their old peers. Man Overboard’s infamous “Defend Pop Punk” shirt was initially a parody/rebuke of the Effort’s “Destroy Pop Punk” design before it mutated into something with a life of its own. Still, for a brief period from maybe 2007 to about 2013, there was a sparkling scene that seemed to encompass everyone from the burliest hardcore kids to the softest twinkly-guitar devotees all at once. In 2013 and 2014, there was a huge tonal shift as the “emo revival” tag swept the blogosphere and was finally picked up by Pitchfork, Drowned In Sound, etc., and releases by bands like the Story So Far reached commercial heights that once again drew battle lines in the sand between genres— but for a few bright, wide-eyed years, it seemed like the scene was going to hold tight and not splinter like it had so many times in the past.

Throughout these years, there were bands that it seemed like almost everyone agreed on— bands like Fireworks (the band that gave me the name of my brand), Title Fight (who I wrote a weepy tribute to a few weeks ago), and the Wonder Years chief among them. This is a phenomenon that I’ve written about a few times, most comprehensively in this little history lesson for No Echo, but these were bands that everyone turned up for when they came through town and often played mixed bills. These days it seems unthinkable that the 2010 iterations of Tigers Jaw and Ceremony could coexist, but they played together more than once that year.

It feels tempting to give credit for this cohabitation to the easycore scene (and indeed Four Year Strong were one of the most significant players in this phenomenon), but the fact is that this was a natural extension of a long-gestating trend that had really began to bubble in earnest back in the mid-90s, when bands like Lifetime and CIV were injecting more complex melodic intricacies and a more earnest and introspectively emotive lyrical focus into meat-and-potatoes East Coast hardcore. While the West Coast had long had a streak of pop sensibilities splattered on top of their speedy punk riffing, it was a pretty new phenomenon for someone to take the pulsating mosh parts of bands like Earth Crisis and Sick of It All and turn them into high-octane sing-along (rather than shout-along) anthems about heartbreak, friends, and self-improvement.

The late 90s and early 2000s saw a spat of these bands continue to reach steadily more success— the legendary Kid Dynamite perfected the sound and blew the doors open before imploding, leaving in their wake a series of progressively more popular bands: the Movielife, Midtown, Saves the Day, and New Found Glory being some of the most notable, all emerging from basement shows and hardcore backgrounds and ending up as MTV2 and Fuse staples.

By 2005, Fall Out Boy had managed to ride this fusion to the highest position on the pop charts, themselves begetting an entirely new scene of bands that had no discernible roots in hardcore and so weren’t afraid of getting progressively more saccharine— Cute Is What We Aim For, All Time Low, et al— and inadvertently launching mainstream pop-punk into its neon era. However, that means that there was a vacuum left in the underground for bands who were combining the authentic grit and grist of hardcore with a scruffy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed talent for sticky hooks. It’s probably no coincidence that 2005 is also the year that marked the formation of the Wonder Years.

The Wonder Years rose from the ashes of the Hatfield, Pennsylvania band The Premier. Their sole release, the Live Like You’re Dying EP, emerged as an interesting but less-than-fully-formed curio in early 2005— equal parts the self-serious mope of late 90s post-emo indie bands like the Gloria Record, deceptively intricate post-hardcore like Further Seems Forever, and speedy and unorthodox power pop that lay somewhere within the nexus of the Starting Line, Fountains of Wayne, and Motion City Soundtrack. It was also replete with gang vocals, hardcore energy, and the occasional prototypical mathy guitar line that owed a debt to their Pennsylvania peer Joe Reinhart, who had gotten wet behind the ears with Halfway to Holland and would soon ascend to greater songwriting heights in the legendary Algernon Cadwallader. There was even a weepy acoustic song that would end up being particularly prescient.

But if that enormous list of influences tells you anything, it’s that the Premier wore them all on their sleeves. Ambitious beyond their experience, the Premier possessed the guts to reach for the stars with their songwriting but didn’t quite have the experience necessary to write songs as innovative, progressive, and cohesive as they were striving for (it’s similar to the endearing and hopeful imagination of the earliest Say Anything recordings). Still, the Premier possessed a few secret weapons. Nick Steinborn contributed both vocal and guitar work—surprisingly mature and creative guitar interplay that lent the EP a depth and density that it otherwise wouldn’t have had. Also contributing vocals (a mixture of softer crooning and burly hardcore shouts) as well as manning the drum kit was Matt Brasch. And on lead vocals and bass, there was Dan “Soupy” Campbell, a frontman of considerable range— he could volley from a gentle, intimate, lilting delivery to a tuneful-yet-intense near-scream with perfect timing and force— who was also displaying a raw but undeniable talent at lyricism (EP highlight “Last Chance Rhode Island” contains the simultaneously tryhard-but-beautiful line “We write history in headlights and count exit signs”).

The Premier was a product of their time (check the burn-the-house-down screams followed up by a kind of hilarious spoken-word performance on closer “Top Ten Reasons to Lose Your Faith In Mankind”) and for a bunch of eighteen-year-olds, the level of commitment and lack of levity was just a bit too much to sustain. And so it was— a few other songs released exclusively on MySpace and some PureVolume success aside, the Premier fell apart with little fanfare, joining the ranks of so many other forgotten Pennsylvania hardcore/hardcore-adjacent bands from the early 2000s like Inkling (an excellent off-kilter metalcore band whose members went on to projects as diverse as the Minor Times and the Starting Line— all three of these bands have been cited as influences on the Wonder Years) and Little League (who sounded a lot like Saves the Day and later became Kill Verona— their song “Lucky” was immortalized in later Wonder Years lyrics).

But in the latter days of the Premier, the central songwriting duo of Campbell and Brasch (who had moved to guitar) began knocking out some songs in local drummer Mike Kennedy’s basement. Rather than the lovelorn, white-knuckle drive and depressiveness of their previous material, this new project was borne of a desire to turn the in-jokey nature of that scene’s era of song titles (sample: “Dude Status: Revoked” by Drowningman) into actual songs, resulting in the first song this new band ever wrote, “Buzz Aldrin: The Poster Boy for Second Place.” Pretty soon, the band picked up steam and added some more members, all but one of whom is still in the band to this day: Josh Martin on bass, Casey Cavaliere on guitar, and, in the same it’s-a-joke-but-not-really manner as many of the early decisions by the band, Mikey Kelley on keys. Taking their name from a paper written by one of Campbell’s mentors, the Wonder Years was born as the Premier limped toward its finale.

After their first release, a split single with none other than Emergency & I (named for the Dismemberment Plan album, their lineup appropriately included Mike Pelone, Campbell’s best friend and a legendary figure in the PA scene), a flurry of shows ensued, a tacit hint towards the idea that perhaps the Wonder Years were more serious than their songs suggested. In 2006, Campbell started the label Forgive & Forget with Pelone to distribute the Wonder Years’ next release, a split with fellow “heavy pop-punk” peddlers Bangarang!. Though the record label would not last beyond this release, its name held a powerful meaning; it was named for the seminal Get-Up Kids song, a shared favorite band between Campbell and Pelone.

In 2007, the Wonder Years attached themselves to the young West Coast label No Sleep, who at the time were best known for releasing the sole EP by Our American Cousin, How’s This for a Diploma?, an enthusiastic update on the late 90s emo sound that is often forgotten as one of the earliest contributions to the “emo revival” scene. The resulting album, Get Stoked On It!, is probably most notable for nipping at the heels of their friends, the Massachusetts band Four Year Strong and the Bay Area’s Set Your Goals, both of whom had found a level of acceptance in the hardcore scene (SYG are named after the first CIV album and at the time had signed to Eulogy, who were known for putting out metalcore albums as well as the pop-punk side-projects of said metalcore bands), and yet were forging an oddly accessible take on the genre by adding keyboards, polished singing, refreshingly positive and playful lyrics, and playing breakdowns in major key, flipping the brutal-to-bouncy-fun polarity on its head. (Both bands were also weirdly attached to classic 80s kid-mischief flick The Goonies— see here, here, and here).

If Get Stoked On It! hadn’t been released a mere month after Four Year Strong’s monolithic perfection of the formula, Rise or Die Trying, the comparisons probably wouldn’t have been so brutal— but unfortunately, a combination of this bad timing and the Wonder Years’ relative immaturity (in both lyrical content and songwriting) led to some unflattering contrasts. At the time, the style was mostly referred to as “pop punk with breakdowns” or, shudder, “happy hardcore,” and it was clear that the Wonder Years were not in the top tier of participants.

That’s not to say Get Stoked On It! is a waste of time or completely inessential— far from it. There are some strong moments on the record, and from the hyperactive opener “Keystone State Dudecore” (thank god that term didn’t catch on) it was clear that the Wonder Years could play. It’s also home to the beginnings of Campbell’s iconic lyrical style— despite being mostly in the service of jokes, there’s a stream-of-consciousness flow to the lyrics, a primordial blend of a Bukowskian “literary” streak, diaristic impulses, and dense references. If Take This To Your Grave was Pete Wentz’s attempt to push the idiosyncratic, extended-metaphor style of Saves the Day’s Chris Conley past its limit, Campbell was taking that soup and adding his own spices to it— witty turns-of-phrase colliding with references to music and pop culture of variable obscurity. “My Geraldine Lies Over the Delaware” is a veiled reference to Hellogoodbye’s “Bonnie Taylor Shakedown,” while album closer “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” is a Chappelle’s Show shout-out (despite getting beat to the punch by Emmure by a few months).

Aside from the hooky chorus and destructive breakdown bundled within the tortured sugary junk-food gang fight of fan-favorite “‘Bout to Get Fruit-Punched, Homie,” “Goes Wrong” is also by far the strongest song on the album. A mid-tempo, straight-forward pop-punk song about having a shitty job, “Goes Wrong” consists largely of a breathless stretch of references both pop cultural and universally personal:

“All we need is Kerouac and a glass of sweet tea,
Or burritos and New Found Glory.
I'm just trying to get through the week.
Hey, do you think that you could loan me ten bucks
So that I could buy the new season of Scrubs?
I'm short on cash this week and I'd pay you back on Thursday.”

When Campbell intones that he’s “got these friends that hate their fucking lives,” it’s somehow triumphant— a declaration of youthful ennui and hopelessness that’s oddly defiant in the face of the economic destruction and dismal career prospects of kids in a working-class town shortly before the ‘08 recession. They were living the grim reality that would extend to the rest of the country in less than a year, and they were, albeit self-deprecatingly, extolling the virtues of having a group of friends that were just as miserable and bored as you— shit like that makes you unfailingly loyal.

The Wonder Years were reaching the end of their joke period. Less than a year before, they had given a terribly-aged interview to web publication Punktastic that summed up their somewhat-bro-y and painfully mid-00s ethos. A few choice highlights:

“Basically, we were in serious bands that wrote ’emotional’ songs about ‘heartbreak.’ Then, we cut out the gay, added some awesome and decided we needed to start a pop punk band…”

“[B]reakdowns make us feel like we aren’t pussies.”

“[W]e started typing hotmail.com into Kennedy’s address bar, but the first auto-complete URL option was hotchicksbigasses.com.”

NOTE: THIS WAS A CLEARLY TONGUE-IN-CHEEK INTERVIEW GIVEN LIKE 15 YEARS AGO, THE BAND’S VIEWS HAVE OBVIOUSLY EVOLVED, AND SOUPY USES HIS PLATFORM TO SPEAK AGAINST INJUSTICE AND BE AN ALLY ON A REGULAR BASIS. AS A SELF-DECLARED “GAY PUSSY” AND “HOT CHICK WITH A BIG ASS,” I THINK THIS IS NOTHING MORE THAN A HILARIOUS RELIC OF 2006 AND SO SHOULD YOU. IF YOU USE THIS TO ATTEMPT TO CANCEL THE WONDER YEARS, YOU ARE AN IDIOT AND UNDESERVING OF LOVE.

Whether the slowly-growing cult of fans building around the Wonder Years’ music was aware of it or not, this persona was growing thin for the band themselves.

It didn’t help that, as 2008 rolled around, their peers and mentors were heading for greener pastures— recruited along with the severely underrated melodic hardcore band Crime In Stereo and rising Floridian superstars A Day to Remember, Four Year Strong and Set Your Goals joined New Found Glory, who had long ago ascended to pop-punk royalty, on a tour that simultaneously celebrated this burgeoning trend as well as New Found Glory’s re-embrace of their hardcore roots. New Found Glory had originated as the side project of guitarist Chad Gilbert, who had been the vocalist for the progressive and melodic metalcore band Shai Hulud since he was fourteen; after ascending to the level of TRL idols throughout the early 2000s, they were reclaiming their hardcore roots by signing to Boston’s Bridge 9 and releasing an EP that featured covers of Gorilla Biscuits, Shelter, and Lifetime. If the 2008 tour was meant to be a victory lap, they chose the perfect name for it; although Fall Out Boy had toyed with calling themselves “softcore” to poke fun at their decidedly sweeter variation of hardcore, New Found Glory revisited a term from an old T-shirt design of theirs and realized how snugly it fit over themselves and their tour-mates. Thus, the Easycore Tour began and a new sound became codified.

In the long run, the Wonder Years were wise in their decision to distance themselves from the easycore scene, which quickly became oversaturated and faded into obscurity (with the notable exceptions of early adopters Four Year Strong and A Day to Remember). It was also much more in keeping with the attitude from the 2006 interview, and the Wonder Years were rapidly abandoning the over-the-top fratitude for darker and more sincere lyrical themes— luckily, it was hard for Campbell to shake his dry wit.

And anyway, the Wonder Years were quickly falling in with a group of pop-punk bands who took their hardcore influences to heart in a much deeper way: playing songs with smarter, more subtle hooks; touring in a much more DIY fashion; writing more difficult and obfuscated lyrics; developing more expansive and interesting song structures; extending the incessant heaviness and intensity of hardcore throughout their entire songs rather than consigning it to major-key breakdowns; eschewing synths almost entirely. Some of these bands were even introducing the same kind of twinkly, delicate, intertwining guitar work of the late-90s post-emo bands that the Premier were taking from. Bands like Transit, Man Overboard, Title Fight, Fireworks (unsung pioneers of this style, releasing songs that sounded like this all the way back in 2006), Tigers Jaw, and Into It. Over It. were beginning to make some noise in the smaller but more enthusiastic scene that congregated in slightly deeper recesses than MySpace: Punknews comment sections; hidden AbsolutePunk and Last.fm forum threads; blogs like If You Make It; word-of-mouth and Tumblr posts by bands and fans alike. By 2009, this scene would find its unofficial home with Property of Zack, but before that, it was much more difficult to find information on these bands, and those who did were often led to even more underground bands like Snowing.

The Wonder Years didn’t immediately transition to this scene overnight, but in 2008 they released an essential stepping stone, the Won’t Be Pathetic Forever EP, which is often cited by Campbell as the moment that the band truly became themselves in earnest. Despite some vestigial easycore trappings (they’re still using synth here, and although it’s fantastic, Mikey Kelly would leave the band the following year to pursue other artistic endeavors and it would be used sparingly, if at all, on future releases), Won’t Be Pathetic Forever is home to some huge steps forward, both in lyrical quality and focused, powerful songwriting. The first two tracks— bombastic intro “Mike Kennedy Is A Bad Friend,” which contains the iconic ad-lib “Head above water this year, boys,” and “Solo & Chewy: Holdin’ It Down”— hew closer to the sound of Get Stoked On It!, but the production, previously murky and tinny, is now clear, expansive, and powerful.

“Solo & Chewy” is a tour song, something that would become a consistent theme in Campbell’s lyrics going forward, and it’s filled with jokey energy— it kicks off with an iconic Simpsons sample, there’s a line about staying up too late to watch The Office, someone actually sings “Yo, man, I think that girl just saw your dick”— but it coalesces into a massive outro, staccato and anthemic before transitioning into an overbearing pop-punk finale complete with layered vocal melodies and slick guitar interplay (a new addition to the Wonder Years’ repertoire, which would only become more complex and dense as time went on), and gang vocals, a winning formula that reappears throughout the rest of the EP to excellent effect. This song also advances Campbell’s self-awareness and layered reflexivity as both lyricist and musician— “Arizona’s airport is called Sky Harbor, I wonder if that’s what the last song on Clarity’s about?”; the constant references to the other band members— which would soon become an inextricable element of the Wonder Years’s identity.

The EP’s back half is home to the two true classics, the title track and “You’re Not Salinger. Get Over It.” (Fun fact: the title of this song is a direct quote from Fireworks vocalist Dave MacKinder upon hearing the then-most-recent Wonder Years demos.) Both of these songs stand up as some of the best that the Wonder Years have to offer to this day, in my opinion.

The former rides a bouncy, bass-driven opening into a monumental chorus, and the entire song is awash in Campbell’s “this is what I did today” populism, using the highly specific to evoke the highly relatable. If “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” was the blueprint, “Won’t Be Pathetic Forever” is the skyscraper; Campbell sketches the minuscule details with such care, feigning casual observation in order to make the bigger picture undeniably clear. The character beats are simple and obvious— I work a shitty job and sleep in late. I watch trash TV because it’s too much effort to find the remote. There’s fucking nothing to do. I hate what I’m doing with my life.— but it’s the innocuous asides about Sour Patch Kids, MadTV, and drinking orange juice while your friends get sloshed that slot you into Campbell’s shoes, empathizing to such a degree that by the time you get to the massive bridge— pop-punk bands have been singing about their hometown for years, but none have ever made it so explicit as the Wonder Years screaming “I fucking love this town, I fucking hate this town,” codifying the trope in the process— you’re fully on board. Campbell possesses the fascinating ability to make you see the world through his eyes and simultaneously feel like one of his closest friends, and this song is where that all started.

But while “Pathetic” is meticulously-constructed in the three-minute-pop song tradition, “Salinger” draws far more from the hardcore end of the spectrum. This is one of the first showcases of Kennedy’s insane drum chops— he was tasteful and tonally essential to “Pathetic,” but “Salinger” would fall completely apart without his manic beat and deceptively technical fills. The high-pitched synth heightens the frantic energy rather than detracting from it, and while the Wonder Years would go on to write many, many angry songs (and songs about feeling angry), I’m not sure any have topped Campbell’s first lines in the song, furiously spitting “We’re finding out some scummy fuck just threw it in a 15-year-old/I mean come on, man, is that the life you want?” We would not find out just how far this sentiment would set the Wonder Years apart from many other pop-punk bands for years to come, but it’s chilling in retrospect. The song goes on to retread many of the same themes as the title track— doing dumb shit with your friends, desperately wanting to leave your life behind— but does so with such fervor that it’s not only forgivable, but you’re left wanting more.

If the Wonder Years were going to leave easycore behind, they could have done much worse than closing that chapter of their lives with two of the best songs in the genre (both of which arguably transcend it). Throughout the next couple years, the Wonder Years would continue to shed their skin, and many of these transitional tracks— previously released on compilations and split singles— can conveniently be found on the 2013 collection Sleeping On Trash. There’s several throwaway tracks— early versions of songs that were recorded for Get Stoked On It! make up a full third of the track listing, and “Through Two Hearts,” a tepid acoustic tribute to Steve Irwin, is only funny the first time you hear it— but there are several indispensable rarities here: “An Elegy for Baby Blue,” which is about a stolen bike, starts out only semi-ironically and becomes almost entirely earnest by the end; the surprisingly varied and complex “Don’t Open the Fridge!”; a genuinely touching acoustic tribute to lonely white-trash Christmases called “Christmas at 22”; and “Leavenhouse. 11:30.”, which is one of the few Wonder Years songs that borders on true hardcore territory, a short and fast rager that tenderly sketches the journey the band had taken from their initial discovery of the DIY scene to who they had become, with references to both Inkling and the Premier adding to the insider feeling.

The Wonder Years also recorded three covers during this transitional period: two of them are covers of power-pop classics (“Zip Lock” by Lit and “Hey Julie” by Fountains of Wayne), acknowledgments of the more carefully-constructed pop sensibilities that the band was beginning to incorporate, and the third is an extremely faithful and energetic cover of the classic Kid Dynamite track, “Cheap Shots, Youth Anthems” (even though it’s from the slightly inferior second LP rather than the first LP, which is one of my top 5 records of all time, I’ll forgive them), a nod to the tradition that the Wonder Years was directly drawing from and expanding upon.

In retrospect, 2010 was truly the inflection point of what might be crudely referred to as the Defend Pop Punk scene. The previous year had seen The Last Thing You Forget by Title Fight and All I Have to Offer Is My Own Confusion by Fireworks begin to gain some traction, but Man Overboard’s Real Talk was really the first release that I saw people besides the kids I saw at shows talking about. But the breakthrough release for pop-punk that year was unquestionably the Wonder Years’s The Upsides. Their final release for No Sleep, it was also more of a revamp of their sound than even Won’t Be Pathetic Forever. Drummer Mike Kennedy had briefly left the band, replaced by Nick Steinborn (who had also previously been in the Premier). Of course, Kennedy rejoined in short order, but instead of dismissing Steinborn, the band kept him on to provide occasional keys and background vocals, as well as an additional guitar assault, which contributed to the far more dense and heavy feeling of the album as a whole.

This far more aggressive and focused instrumental attack melded exceedingly well with Campbell’s lyrics and vocals, which were becoming much more raw and desperate. Having written the lyrics during a series of early morning bike rides, it was initially supposed to be a much more dour affair about completely giving up, but a combination of the band’s inherent sense of humor and those poetic signs from the universe we all unconsciously look for in our early 20s— in Campbell’s case, the fountain at Logan Circle getting turned on— gave the record an underlying kick of determined optimism, a feeling of continuing to get up after get kicked down day after day.

The Upsides might not have consciously been a concept album, but it was certainly a cohesive statement, far more focused and less disjointed than any previous Wonder Years outing. And in retrospect, it would come to mark the beginning of a trio of albums that Campbell would dub “The Depression Trilogy”— a series of records about struggling with depression and loneliness that nakedly confront a fear of being lost and trapped. The Upsides is also the album that established the Cult of the Wonder Years— kids who tapped into the band’s slogans, who embraced their iconography (a dejected and scruffy bird, termed Hank the Pigeon, became the band’s de riguer mascot), and who rallied around the band as merchants of therapeutic catharsis. The reason for this is much more simple than it may seem on the outset. The Wonder Years couldn’t be boiled down to the freewheeling, fun-with-your-bros vibes of their easycore peers nor the self-perpetuating cycles of misery that so many emo and pop-punk bands before and after would traffic in— they synthesized the two.

The Wonder Years certainly weren’t the first band to foster a tribe around their music, and they weren’t the first band to advocate persevering against the harsh and heavy tides of poor mental health, but the combination of the triumphant and ascendant bridges— a sort of posi update on the endless climaxes that Taking Back Sunday had codified on Tell All Your Friends— and Campbell’s populist, downtrodden-everyman persona struck a lot of kids in high school and college who hadn’t come across these sentiments before, or at least hadn’t encountered them delivered with the candor and wit that the Wonder Years easily conjured. A lot of kids, myself included, realized a central tenet of emotional development through the Wonder Years before a therapist was ever able to tell them: you can’t control your emotions, but you can control your responses to them.

It’s easy to forget now, but if you were into the scene that would eventually get sloppily clumped under the “DIY” umbrella back in the late 2000s, your options for emotional representation were often pretty clearly delineated by subgenre— you listened to hardcore when you were pissed off, you listened to twinkly emo when you were sad, and you listened to pop-punk when you wanted to have fun. The Upsides certainly wasn’t the first album to encompass all these styles and emotions at once— not by a long shot— but it was both one of the most popular and one of the most successful. It helped that Campbell wrote lyrics in a language that seemed custom-made for you and your friends— in mid-album standout “It’s Never Sunny In South Philadelphia,” his assertion that “I don’t think I love anything the way that some people love Morrissey” was pretty fucking clever, managing to accurately sum up a certain type of person with funny, succinct accuracy as well as clearly communicating that sense of apathy and despondency in a way that registered with a specific target audience.

Campbell’s lyrical influences on The Upsides ranged from the mordant, wink-nudge empathy of the Mountain Goats to the esoteric and ironically detached storytelling of the Hold Steady, but one of the most unsung influences here is Depressive Suicidal Philadelphia Hardcore (DSPH) icons Blacklisted, whose frontman George Hirsch is particularly adept at fusing naked confessions of dark and self-loathing ideations with clever, deeply-nested nods to past bands in their genre, establishing Blacklisted as both students and masters of their chosen game. Campbell accomplishes this feat multiple times on the album, to the point where the game of spot-the-reference becomes part of the album’s appeal as much as the muscular, hard-hitting instrumentation and indelible hooks. For example, on the stellar third track “Everything I Own Fits In This Backpack,” Campbell comments about how his new place is “better than Bancroft Street/At least the fridge here works and the walls don’t leak,” a direct reference to their previous track “Don’t Open the Fridge!”, while simultaneously smuggling in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references to the Weakerthans, Biggie Smalls, Bukowski, and Blacklisted themselves.

There’s also the arc words of The Upsides, “I’m not sad anymore, I’m just tired of this place”; they’re the first words you hear on the album, on quintessential fuck-college opener “My Last Semester” (Asher Roth would be so disappointed). They crop up again, albeit slightly modified, in track two, “Logan Circle,” which in many ways is the entire album’s thesis statement— similar to “Won’t Be Pathetic Forever,” “Logan Circle” is a treatise on hanging out with your friends, hating where you live, and trying not to succumb to depression, replete with lovely touches like “drowning my sorrows in Lucky Charms and soy milk” and acknowledging that “the Blue Man Group won’t cure depression, and it’s probably the song that most defines The Upsides lyrically. The phrase comes full circle in the gargantuan closer “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands,” but we’ll get to that momentarily.

Although I quite literally could gush about Campbell’s stature as a lyricist for far longer, it’s important to acknowledge just how fucking good the music is on The Upsides as well: Kennedy has really come into his own as a drummer, completely owning the tone and style of each track with expertly-placed rolls and fills and a uniquely thunderous playing style; Cavaliere, Steinborn, and Brasch churn out a surprisingly creative and interdependent guitar dynamic, chemically tying together influences from the heft of hardcore (“Dynamite Shovel,” the bridge of “New Year’s Eve with Carl Weathers”) with pop-punk riffs that manage to be catchy, idiosyncratic, and unique all at once, and also seamlessly incorporate a smidge of complex indiemo/math rock noodling (often found twisting its way around the main riffs without taking over the mix or overstaying its welcome); and Josh Martin’s bass work is such a fantastic addition to the low end, occasionally popping up for a pleasant melodic highlight (not an easy feat in an album dominated by three prominent guitarists).

The Upsides is an album of remarkable consistency— the few tracks that could be considered filler transcend the classification because of the band’s unique approach to the material. “Dynamite Shovel” is one of the few times I think Campbell’s rebukes of religious zealotry and bigotry could be fairly critiqued— his portraits of inbred Southerners here are a bit classist for my taste, but I definitely see where he was coming from while writing it, and on a musical level, the track is undeniably blistering. “Hey Thanks,” a potentially-pithy ukulele track where Campbell duets with Rachel Minton of Zolof the Rock’n’Roll Destroyer, avoids becoming too cutesy and cloying by sketching an image of a flawed relationship that could be on the verge of falling apart. Many people have been in a situation where things just aren’t working out, but you still find comfort in the routines of your relationship and the presence of another; it’s the feeling of loving someone but knowing you’ve fallen out of love. Still, the other person knows you well, and tolerates your quirks and failures more than most, just as you do theirs. Not many pop-punk bands have the emotional maturity to contend with this particular stage of any relationship, which is why the Wonder Years’s ability to conjure that unique sort of melancholy was so refreshing.

“Dynamite Shovel”’s condemnation of bigotry (“spewing rhetoric I thought was reserved for Westboro Baptists”) is also symbolic of how the band as a whole had become much more progressive not just on a musical level, but on a personal level as well. A few years prior they were still calling songs about heartbreak “gay”; by “My Last Semester,” they were proudly rebuking the homophobic and toxically masculine culture of the frat boys they met in college:

“The homophobic bullshit that’s somehow okay
Just because you didn’t mean it that way
I can’t take any more of all the scum in this place
Shitty dudes with tribal tattoos all around me
Lining up cheap beer and roofies for a party at their place”

On this subject, it’s also notable that The Upsides contains one of the band’s few true breakup tracks, the breathlessly catchy and bouncy “Melrose Diner.” This is one of those songs at the forefront of my mind when I talk about Campbell’s ability to simultaneously critique and transcend the conventions of the pop-punk genre— the song is cleverly built out of the concept of pretending to hate things you miss about your ex. It’s also careful never to point the finger— even after insulting the “broke-dick version of [him]” that his ex is hanging out with, Campbell makes a point of saying that his friends are just trying to help him sleep at night and he knows “he’s what you need.” A pop-punk song about an ex that eschews bitterness for an acknowledgment of human flaws and that everyone needs different things— now that’s unconventional.

There is “This Party Sucks,” which comes uncomfortably close to slut-shaming (referring to girls at clubs as “the Girls Gone Wild B-team”), but mostly the song is a rowdy, catchy, mostly straightforward pop-punk scene about being an introvert at parties, aiming most of the venom at Campbell himself as well as the sketchy dudes he always seems to be surrounded by when he goes out. It also contains my single favorite lyric about DIY shows:

“I can’t believe I ended up here again
Watching this terrible band play songs I hate in my basement
I can’t believe I ended up here again
While the kid with the dreads tells me he’s smarter on acid”

The whole album does a great job of balancing that wit with a genuine sense of desperation to claw your way out of misery— for every funny throwaway line in “New Year’s Eve with Carl Weathers” (in which Drew from the band I Call Fives sexts with a girl while tripping on NyQuil), there’s a self-motivating line about how “it’s gonna be our year.” In “Hostels & Brothels,” Joe gets cock-blocked by Bobby, but Campbell also gets a phone call from his dad saying things are gonna get brighter.

The album ends with a one-two tour de force in “Washington Square Park” and “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands.” “Washington” is a massive song, a melodic hardcore masterpiece that relishes in its throttling, breakneck pace before lapsing into a monstrous breakdown that draws parallels between struggling with depression and a fistfight. Meanwhile, “Bar Bands” is the rallying cry of the entire scene at the time, mounting a war cry that builds from somber acoustics to a rousing climax that ties the “I’m not sad anymore” theme together completely; it’s augmented by a star-studded series of guest appearances, a communal purging of demons in which, for a moment at least, the Wonder Years, Man Overboard, Title Fight, and Fireworks are all the same band, and everyone is struggling with the same overbearing emotions. It’s a powerful conclusion to a powerful record.

The success of The Upsides led to an extremely fast ascension for the Wonder Years; although they briefly flirted with the idea of signing to Eulogy, they decided to connect with Hopeless, the label that they have stayed with ever since. A reissue of The Upsides came in short order (with bonus tracks that also appeared on the limited EP Manton Street that Run for Cover released in 2013). The bonus tracks accomplish so much— at once bridging the sonic gaps between The Upsides and their newer, even darker material, while also functioning as direct commentary on the success they found with The Upsides.

The most famous of these is “I Was Scared & I’m Sorry,” a rough dry run for the sonics they’d explore on their next record that also functions as a succinct explanation of where Campbell was at emotionally directly following the release of The Upsides. It chronicles the aftermath of a brutal breakup with such bare honesty and vulnerability that it’s honestly shocking— who else would admit to having a nervous breakdown in the bathroom of an Outback? But also, who else would find time in the middle of such a catastrophically emotional song to admit that their feel-good movie is Forgetting Sarah Marshall? It’s another excellent fusion of the mundane and the poignant, another perfectly distilled thesis statement of the bands’ ethos.

Although the acoustic rework of “Dynamite Shovel” isn’t essential, the new, piano-driven redux of “Logan Circle” (dubbed “A New Hope”) absolutely is. It self-consciously explicates some of the more personal lines on the original track— on his usage of soy milk in his cereal, Campbell humorously clarifies that “For the record, I’m not vegan, I just prefer the taste,” and also juxtaposes the shooting off of fireworks in the original tracks with getting pretzels with the actual band Fireworks (and quoting their song “Detroit” while he’s at it). He openly declares that the Wonder Years is a pop-punk band and shrugs off the writing process of The Upsides bothering his neighbors with the pithy one-liner “They keep us up having sex anyway.” If the mythology of the Wonder Years is making the extremely personal public, “Logan Square: A New Hope” does that in spades.

Campbell continues to bare his soul with the gentle “We Won’t Bury You.” Mike Pelone had received an obscured shout-out on the album proper that hinted towards his troubles (“I’ve had the same best friend since ‘93/I call, he’s not answering”) but “We Won’t Bury You” was written while he was in rehab for prescription drug abuse. Pelone tragically died before he was able to hear the song, adding an extra touch of bitter irony and becoming a recurring subject for some of the most gut-wrenching songs in the Wonder Years’s future efforts, but the plaintive pleas and tastefully minor details that Campbell lays out here— including a mention of Pelone’s Get-Up Kids tattoos— is crystallized in time, becoming a pre-mortem memorial overflowing with empathy and unobscured heartache.

The events that occurred after The Upsides’s release formed much of the basis for the Wonder Years’s follow-up, Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing. In addition to the darker themes, Suburbia also pumped steroids into the musical and lyrical qualities of The Upsides, exploring heavier and more expansive territory with the same artful and carefully-constructed approach. Instead of one title track, the major thematic cornerstones of Suburbia are divided into three progressively more tortured movements: the slight-but-explosive “Suburbia”; “I’ve Given You All,” a tender acoustic portrait of a working-class town falling apart; and the mammoth closer “And Now I’m Nothing,” whose title doubles as a callback to a lyric from “I’m Scared & I’m Sorry” (part of a broader trend of making harder-to-find deep cuts inextricable elements of the band’s running narrative).

The album was produced by the legendary Steve Evetts, and he ups the ante on the heaviness of the band’s previous material, both emphasizing the clarity of each element of the band’s sound and constructing a deep and overwhelming soundscape that hits the listener like a truck. The band’s playing was arguably at its peak here— coming hot off the heels of breathless touring, they’re more polished and in sync than ever before. Evetts’s involvement also provides one of my favorite Easter eggs nestled into the Wonder Years’s mythos— the album closes with Campbell declaring that he’s keeping his “shoulder to the wheel,” a veiled reference to both the Saves the Day song of the same name on Through Being Cool, which Evetts also produced, as well as the closing lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” a poem which is extremely important to the DNA of Suburbia.

The band’s self-reflexivity doesn’t end there, either— the Bukowski/Blacklisted reference from “Backpack” pops up again much more explicitly on “Woke Up Older,” a fantastic pop-punk track that again inverts break-up tracks by analyzing the maturity that comes with the end of any relationship. Campbell also spotlights the album’s inspiration and the place it adapted its title from, Ginsberg’s “America,” with the closing verse on “And Now I’m Nothing”— “I had dreams of myself as the Allen Ginsberg of this generation without the madness, talent, or vision.” (I highly recommend you read “America” in its entirety; even if you’ve grown too woke to appreciate the Beats— and I certainly have not— there’s plenty here to tantalize the discerning fan of Suburbia, as the album’s structure mirrors that of the poem quite closely, and song titles like “I Won’t Say the Lord’s Prayer” and the opening lyrics of “Coffee Eyes” reveal themselves to be further quotes and allusions.) The phrase “of this generation” forms part of the arc of the album as well: opener “Came Out Swinging” refers to the band’s fast-food diet with the phrase “We’re this generation’s Morgan Spurlock,” while he describes his group of suburban miscreants in “Summers In PA” as “This generation’s Outsiders.”

“Summers In PA” is also a neat piece of mythmaking and narrative evolution— it includes a mention of Spiro (previously spotlighted during the band’s laundry list of friends in “Bar Bands”), who lied about his major, and also features a triumphant return of their friends in Four Year Strong, whose frontmen Alan Day and Dan O’Connor deliver a USB-mic-assisted performance during the gang-vocal-ridden bridge.

Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing is, in my opinion, the best Wonder Years album precisely because it’s the peak of the band’s self-awareness, as well as the album where they leaned hardest into one of the biggest unspoken themes throughout most of their work (the suburbs, obviously, and how they are simultaneously suffocating, comforting, destructive, and an inextricable element of the psyche of anyone who grows up there). The best songs on the album, “Coffee Eyes” and “Don’t Let Me Cave In,” succeed not just because of the band’s musical proficiency— although, don’t get it twisted, both tracks are fantastic musically, dynamic pieces of furiously catchy melodic hardcore that explode into unassailably cathartic climaxes— but also due to Campbell’s uniquely intimate lyrics.

“Coffee Eyes” is an ode to the diner that every group of friends ends up in after a show, drinking coffee until the wee hours of the morning and, throughout the years, slowly witnessing the strands of musical interest and close proximity fall apart as people grow up and grow apart. “There’s always been a table for me here” isn’t just a statement about the comfort that having a consistent place to hang out provides, but also about how the nostalgia of those times you spent in those places can shatter when you revisit it after years of adulthood has torn your friend group to sheds. There’s also an extra layer about the inevitability of returning to hometown after exploring the outside world, and how simultaneously easy and crushing that can be.

“Don’t Let Me Cave In” is a song that I have an extremely personal attachment to. I might not have necessarily gotten Mexican food with Evan Weiss after a basement show, but my freshman year spent living in Chicago was imbued with the same tragedy that Campbell outlines when he talks about having to leave his girlfriend to catch a plane. This song is about how Campbell moved in with Weiss in Chicago after his breakup to attempt to build a new life, and how hard it can be to leave everything you’ve known and the people who made up your support circle; of course, having a long-distance relationship with my first partner and experiencing that same misery after visiting her and flying back, this song felt like it was my own autobiography.

Funny post-script to that story: after I moved back to Las Vegas, the Wonder Years played an acoustic pop-up at a local record store. Although my relationship with that partner had been doomed for a while, she was kind enough to accompany me to that show (“Hey Thanks,” amirite?). It was at this show that I met my close friend Josh, who has been a huge part of my support system for the last five years, but it was also one of the last gasps of that relationship (we essentially broke up a few months after that, ironically enough, after another Wonder Years show). Anyway, after the acoustic set, I was talking to the guys in the band, and told them about my situation with my partner while I was in Chicago and how after visiting her, I got on the plane and just burst into inconsolable tears when “Don’t Let Me Cave In” came on the headphones, to the point where the airplane staff were giving me worried looks and potentially thought I was a terrorist (which is true, by the way— they asked me to open up the bag I came on the plane with to prove I didn’t have any weapons). To their credit, the band members have probably heard hundreds of similar stories, and they were very nice to me about it, but I have to imagine that hearing that story relayed in the most awkward, halting manner possible, and hearing my then-partner chime in from behind me with a snarky “Imagine how I felt when you left,” led to some strong second-hand embarrassment.

After getting older and losing friends to tragic circumstances— whether it be through overdose, suicide, illness, or just a senseless accident— I’ve also grown to love “You Made Me Want to Be A Saint” to an unhealthy extent. The title is a direct quote from “America,” but the lyrics are directed towards Mike Pelone, and they’re absolutely gut-wrenching. I particularly love the early acknowledgment that Pelone “would have wanted this to be a fast one, and not some cliche ballad,” but “I still hear you in the bass drum beat after ‘I’ll Catch You’” always sits in my gut like lead. Campbell’s vocals are more raw and ragged on Suburbia than on any record prior, but he’s particular ashen on “Saint”; during the desperate and frantic climax that closes the song, he falls into a screaming match with the backing vocals while belting out the “You know the fucked up part is” refrain (the dual gut punch of “I kind of always knew we’d write a song about this/I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t be for you, kid” is just absolutely devastating). It’s a stunning achievement to write a song for a dead friend that retains honesty and doesn’t descend into sticky sentimentality, but the Wonder Years have accomplished this many times since; “Saint” is just the tip of the iceberg.

I do want to reiterate that even if the lyrics on this album didn’t connect to me on this same, unshakably personal level, Suburbia would still be an incredible album on a musical level. It’s not just that the band is both heavier and catchier here; they’re throwing influences from the post-screamo of Envy, the effervescently bittersweet emo-pop of the Anniversary, and the jazzy elevator-emo of American Football onto their formidably meaty base, and it shows throughout: songs inevitably build to crushing climaxes; the hooks aren’t just more plentiful, they’re multi-layered, sprinkling subtle and sticky vocal melodies everywhere between the more obvious choruses and bridges; and the guitar work is easily the most complex and intricate they’d produced to this point, with interesting chord shapes and noodly arpeggios cropping up even in faster-paced tracks like “Local Man Ruins Everything” (which really hammers the fact that this album is much darker than The Upsides with the lyric “The fountain was off,” a direct contrast to the symbolic hopefulness of “Logan Circle” and an assertion that you need to gain motivation for self-improvement from within and not from without) and “My Life As A Pigeon” (an excellent song that includes a characteristically droll interjection from Campbell about “an army of self-righteous kids that only liked the seven-inch”).

From the very beginning of the album— with a characteristically cool drum pattern fading in among a looping Ginsberg sample— to the way that “And Now I’m Nothing” slowly falls apart, piece by piece, Suburbia is a completely cohesive and kinetic work. It explores a little of everything that the Wonder Years have incorporated into their ouvre: “I Won’t Say the Lord’s Prayer” is a vitriolic screed against the morality-as-prescription attitude endemic to organized religion; “Hoodie Weather” is a stellar denouement, returning to the rough yet tender sketches of shattered working-class neighborhoods that “Suburbia” and “I’ve Given You All” had previously introduced and diving deep into the ennui and empty prospects with equal parts empathy and self-loathing; and the essence of the album, and, indeed, everything the Wonder Years was about, is distilled in the chorus of “Local Man Ruins Everything”: “I’m not a self-help book, I’m just a fucked up kid… It’s not about forcing happiness, it’s about not letting sadness win.”

Suburbia is, to me, the peak of the Wonder Years. It’s an album of amazing forethought, intricacy, and purpose of construction, but that doesn’t at all obscure its litany of fist-pumping anthems; rather, it accentuates them. You’ll want to return to a catchy-as-fuck song more than once, but the devil’s in the details on Suburbia, and every new one you catch makes the universe the album constructs feel that much more fully realized. Suburbia, more than any other Wonder Years album, is the one where you feel like another one of Soupy’s best friends.

By now, the between-album bonus tracks aren’t just expected, they’re essential. Although none of the three songs— “My Life As Rob Gordon,” “Me vs. the Highway,” and “Living Room Song”— make Suburbia any weaker with their exclusion, they are all instructive as to why the Wonder Years were the most popular and best band of their era and genre.

“Rob Gordon” is a typically clever Wonder Years song title— self-referential as well as a shout-out to the protagonist of High Fidelity, which ties in neatly with the song’s theme of using music to explain and cope with the problems in your life. The lyrics themselves are no less clever; the opening line, “Kelly says that at the end of each relationship, the boy starts quoting lyrics from that Movielife song,” is easily read as a reference to “If Only Duct Tape Could Fix Everything,” but more sneakily, and read from Kelly’s point of view, is probably about “Kelly Song.” I also get a kick out of “My mom says there’s no song with her name in ‘em, except for one about a crackhead, and ‘Janie’s Got A Gun.’” The song becomes even more heavily self-referential from there: a mea culpa to their friend Max for mentioning him in “Bar Bands” and accidentally opening the floodgates for dorky pop-punk kids to hector him about it; and, in a line directed at Campbell’s ex Jess, “I had a dream we named a kid we never had after ‘Hannah Hold On,’ and I haven’t listened since, cuz it tears me to pieces,” he also inadvertently lays the groundwork for lines in later Wonder Years songs like “Passing Through a Screen Door” and “Thanks for the Ride.” In one song, the Wonder Years accomplish the feat of describing their fans’ relationship with them, empathizing with it, laying seeds for lyrics they wouldn’t write for years, and write a hard-hitting pop-punk single.

“Me vs. the Highway,” which itself would be a touchstone on their next two records (the title is subtly referenced in “Passing Through a Screen Door” and Campbell’s “car crash dreams” reappear in “A Song for Patsy Cline”), is just a great, catchy song about shifting urban landscapes mirroring the shift from childhood to adulthood— thematically, not dissimilar from much of Suburbia, but musically solid enough to be worth a listen in itself, especially the fall-down-on-the-floor-screaming chorus.

“Living Room Song” is a cute acoustic diversion about wanting to be with your friends when the apocalypse comes calling. There’s a shout-out to a New Found Glory hoodie (which, in the electric update they released on the A Comp for Mom compilation for No Sleep a few years later, was updated to a “Modern Baseball hoodie” as a shout-out to their Pennsylvania emo homies). There’s lines about not having trouble sleeping and nobody being able to take that away from Campbell. It’s just a fun acoustic sing-along in the grand campfire pop-punk tradition (see also: “Love Your Friends, Die Laughing” by Man Overboard).

It speaks to the diehard nature of the Wonder Years’s fanbase that these three songs— which basically amount to B-side/bonus track material— became such central parts of the band’s history and legend (whenever the band plays these live, count on the house crashing down around you) as well as being meticulously, almost surreptitiously incorporated into later lyrics that one wouldn’t even catch on to unless they were already fans of the band. I have to imagine that the Wonder Years were becoming rapidly aware of their fans’ rabid obsessiveness and that this was at least partially a concerted effort to give them something to nibble on, and I really respect that, especially given that Suburbia was their most successful record by far up to that point, and their popularity was only growing.

The Wonder Years honestly only seem to grow in popularity, which is, of course, the trajectory that any band would kill for. Still, expectations were so high for their follow-up that when The Greatest Generation finally emerged in 2013, the fact that it not only surpassed but completely reinvented everything that you were expecting to get from the Wonder Years was revelatory.

Although The Greatest Generation isn’t the most critically acclaimed album (that distinction goes to 2015’s No Closer to Heaven, which is, not coincidentally, the album where they began to abandon the pop-punk and melodic hardcore foundations for a more elliptical sound that pulled from indie rock and post-hardcore in greater and greater doses), it’s close, and it was also the album that gave the Wonder Years legitimacy beyond “oh, that’s the pop-punk band that’s better than most of the others” in rock journalist circles. On the one hand, that’s a bit tragic, similarly to The Black Parade being the album that granted My Chemical Romance rock-critic legitimacy. But, also similar to The Black Parade, it’s so fucking good, so focused and creative and impactful, that it’s hard to fault the bloggers for finally glomming on to a band that the kids had known were geniuses for years.

The Greatest Generation is the final album in the Depression Trilogy, and it’s also the most mature; Campbell was beginning to abandon his populist/diaristic lyrical tendencies, although not to the degree that would come (the lyricism on their most recent album, Sister Cities, is so comparatively abstract that it’s hard to believe that it’s the same person). In addition to the lyrics and Campbell’s voice— which had finished the change it started on Suburbia, developing a timbre and emotional range even greater than his previous work along with a crackly grit that adds a lot of resonance— the band was sanding down the edges of their musicianship, writing songs with song structures that were more purposeful and deliberate, but also more conventional and therefore more traditionally effective. The Greatest Generation is the most accessible version of who the Wonder Years were throughout the Depression Trilogy; it’s nice to see, in a way, that after two albums of turmoil and inner torment, it seemed like Campbell and company were finally starting to get their shit together. A lot of writing about the Wonder Years’s arc focuses on the concept of “growing up with the band”; The Greatest Generation is proof that this trite phrase is honestly worth bringing out when it comes to an album like this.

Generation’s pacing is more careful and scrupulous than even Suburbia’s; even if one knows that their previous two albums were concept records, Generation is the one where it feels wrong to listen to the songs as standalone pieces. The Upsides and Suburbia had hits; Generation has signature scenes, as if one is watching a short film.

From the very beginning of opener “There, There”— a wiry, thin guitar accompanied by Campbell’s voice, more crackly and emotionally bare than at any point previous— it’s clear that the Wonder Years were trying to make a Rock Album. More than either of the last two records, the songs on The Greatest Generation are carried by strong, chunky central riffs. On one occasion it falls slightly flat— the mid-tempo “We Could Die Like This” feels a bit too simplistic, despite a pretty good and surprisingly heavy breakdown near the end of the song, and relies a bit too much on talking about the vague concept of “the suburbs,” a theme that the band just spent an entire album analyzing— but for the most part it accomplishes its goal of grandiosity and ambition, making each song feel like a discrete movement throughout the album’s narrative.

Several of the highlights of the album are the songs where Campbell makes his pet themes explicit: “Dismantling Summer” is about losing a grandparent; “Teenage Parents” is about growing up poor. Both are tightly-written and performed (with special mention going to Kennedy’s excellent drum work— the fill that opens “Parents” is unbelievable— and Martin’s bass, which carries “Summer” with bounce and swagger). But while “Parents” benefits from Campbell’s keen eye for detail— having grown up with young, working-class parents, I can absolutely relate to being born before my parents were married and hearing “the voices, the implications, telling me who I could never be,” as well as the endless schedule conflicts and strained family dynamic being necessary for survival— “Summer” is a bit more general, but doesn’t suffer much due to that. “I’ve been acting like I’m strong but the truth is I’ve been losing ground” is a pretty universal sentiment in the face of losing a family member; I don’t think the song loses anything without the obsessive detailing that often elevates other Wonder Years tracks.

But because the Wonder Years are nothing if not a band about the struggles of confused, merging emotions, there’s plenty of songs about reckoning with messiness and uncertainty. “Passing Through a Screen Door”— which can be abbreviated as “PTSD,” tying into the record’s themes of being at war with yourself and drawing comparisons to World War II, juxtaposing the emotional turmoil of the millennial generation with the turmoil of the “Greatest Generation”— is one of the album’s biggest swings, connecting with the ball and smacking it clear to the cheap seats. “The highway won,” declares Campbell, calling back to “Me vs. the Highway,” before tying in “My Life As Rob Gordon” as well— “All the kid’s names I’ve ever liked are tied to tragedy” is a layered reference to the “Hannah Hold On” shoutout, but also alludes to Campbell’s friend Hannah, whose car crash inspired much of the lyrics on No Closer to Heaven’s “Thanks for the Ride.”

“Passing Through a Screen Door” is a song about the self-loathing of the past two records catching up to the band, compounding on the nomadic life of a touring band to produce a profound sense of hopelessness and despair. It’s a song that’s fantastic on its own— a cleaner and more focused update on their previous melodic hardcore leanings with a massive bridge that takes full advantage of Campbell’s ever-improving ability to emote through his voice— but feels especially cathartic in light of the journey the band had been taking its fans on for the better part of three years.

Despite the new focus on tight and straightforward rock songs, two of the highlights of The Greatest Generation come when the band indulges in their hardcore influences. “The Bastards, the Vultures, the Wolves” and “An American Religion (FSF)” are some of the darkest and most aggressive cuts in the band’s catalog; the former offsets its sugary, irrepressible chorus with violent verses and an escalating bridge that buries itself in noise and static until it completely disintegrates, while the latter is their traditional fast song, once again indulging in the World War II metaphors while telling the tale of someone trying their best to recover from and atone for their past mistakes, at once torn apart by friends who have succumbed to drug addiction to numb the pain and thinking of them as cautionary tales that keep calling the narrator to join them. Struggling with addiction, especially when you’ve witnessed friends take plunges that they might never recover from, is a hell of conflicting instincts, and Campbell evokes that with both clarity and deep understanding.

Again, The Greatest Generation isn’t free of songs that don’t hit as hard as the others— “A Raindance In Traffic” and “Chaser” (which, admittedly, has a killer solo, a rarity in the Wonder Years’s catalog) are both solid rock songs, and essential inasmuch as they’re impossible to excise from the album’s flow and narrative, but don’t stand as tall as other individual cuts. There’s also “Madelyn,” a heartfelt acoustic belter that fans often dislike or discount from the album’s success as a whole (personally, I get where they’re coming from, but I think it’s an excellent and wrenching folk-influenced parable that has echoes of material that Campbell would later explore with his Aaron West & the Roaring Twenties project).

Still, everything is forgiven when the album hits its homestretch with “Cul-de-sac,” one of the weightiest songs Campbell has ever written about Mike Pelone. It’s a bit of a difficult song for me to write about— another of the most musically blistering songs in the band’s catalog, it’s about struggling with the flaws of a toxic friend who is doing active harm to others with their self-destructive tendencies, and having to let go of the guilt when their behavior catches up to them, and it feels like it could have written about me at several points in my life.

You may have noticed that I’ve yet to talk about what are often considered to be the best songs the band has ever written, and that’s because I wanted to save the best for last.

First of all, “The Devil In My Bloodstream” is probably the most explosive and destructive song the band has ever made. Consisting of two distinct movements, the song rests on the contrast between the piano-driven, Laura Stevenson-assisted first half and the cacophonous, rhythmic second half. Ostensibly another tale of being road-weary, it eventually explicates the connection between the two distinct wars that the record focuses on— the internal war of the millennial generation and the second world war that defined their grandparents’ generation— through the device of Campbell’s own grandfather. When the song erupts while Campbell screams “I bet I’d be a fucking coward/I bet I’d never have the guts for war,” it’s one of the most affecting moments on the album because it’s one of the most honest lyrics ever written in the genre, about a topic that most other bands in the genre wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. For as much as the band’s appeal lies in Campbell’s lyrics and performances, Mike Kennedy’s drumming is once again their secret weapon; his masterful command of tone and tension-and-release is what makes the song so shocking the first time you hear it, and the songwriting is so artful and intentional that every revisit blows me away.

And finally, “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral” is not just the only way that The Greatest Generation could have ended; it’s the only way this era of the Wonder Years could close itself out. Reprises weren’t new to pop-punk in 2013— indeed, Fall Out Boy arguably accomplished one of the most touching iterations with “What a Catch, Donnie” in 2008— but the way the Wonder Years constructed “Funeral” is so clever and the delivery is so intense and emotional that it’s hard to think of an example that’s topped it. Again, it’s divided into sections— a mid-tempo opening that could have functioned as an apt and succinct closer in itself, a lengthy section that neatly and so, so, so-smartly and carefully ties together lyrics and melodies from the last twelve songs on the record in overwhelmingly emotive fashion, and a show-stopping climax— and the song flows so well that the seven minute runtime goes by in a blink. Many have called My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade” the “Bohemian Rhapsody” of the mall-emo generation— “Funeral” is the next evolution beyond that, an unorthodox fusion of stage-musical tropes and pop-punk, emo, and hardcore influences that definitively closes the door on a time and place in the music scene that meant the world to all involved. The whole song is stellar, but special mention goes to the climactic verse from Campbell, a rallying cry that implies that the Wonder Years (and, correlatively, their fans) are going to be able to move past their traumas and struggles if they’re willing to put in the work:

“I’m sick of seeing ghosts
And I know how it’s all gonna end
There’s no triumph waiting
There’s no sunset to ride off in
We all want to be great men
And there’s nothing romantic about it
I just want to know that I did what I could with all I was given”

If The Greatest Generation is, in part, about the collapse and lie of the great American dream, “Funeral” is the fuck-you to the standards of generations past, an assertion that the band (and, again, the listeners) are going to keep fighting regardless. And with that, the Depression Trilogy— which ended with a great war, much like how the second world war marked the end of the Great Depression— closes the way it began: plainspoken, unwilling to self-deify or make oneself a martyr, just opining on how it feels to be a fuck-up not trying to be so fucked up.

Although it would have been poetic for the Wonder Years to call it quits and move on to other projects after the stunning achievement that was the Depression Trilogy, they’ve continued to do excellent work— No Closer to Heaven introduced a cavalcade of wider influences, showcasing a band coping with trauma and grappling with sociopolitical issues through some of the best songs they’ve ever written (“Cigarettes & Saints,” “Thanks for the Ride,” “I Don’t Like Who I Was Then,” “You In January”), and Sister Cities cemented their transition into a mature alternative rock band capable of achieving even greater commercial heights. But despite these accomplishments, I can’t help but feel as though the Wonder Years are traversing a different world than the one they did in years past. They’re a Rock Band now— no longer the scruffy, self-effacing, achingly vulnerable band of misfits who rubbed shoulders with a thriving underground hardcore scene, I could see this new iteration of the band opening for, like, the Foo Fighters or something like that.

But that’s not a bad thing, nor can one blame the Wonder Years for moving onto more expansive sonic territory. Their influence has been vast— the Brooklyn band Proper. made a seminal Wonder Years lyric into the title of their breakthrough album, I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better, and the band’s kindness and mentorship has assisted several band’s ascensions, whether directly (Campbell produced and guested on the band Trash Boat’s debut album, pushing them to write stronger songs the whole way) or indirectly (the Wonder Years co-signing Modern Baseball did amazing things for that band’s career).

But 2013 really was the end of The Unified Scene as we knew it. The Story So Far capitalized on the underground success of their 2011 debut Under Soil and Dirt with What You Don’t See, breaking through to a much broader audience and expanding the reach of similar-minded pop-punk bands like Neck Deep, Knuckle Puck, Real Friends, and State Champs, who continued to grow in popularity. Defend Pop Punk became a tired, cliche phrase, ripe for mocking; the fanbase of this newer crop of pop-punk bands stopped being aware of their roots in hardcore and clamored for more ever-more processed, plastic recordings and by-the-numbers songs, resulting in a pop-punk scene divorced from outside influences, trapped in an ever-narrowing-pathway of homogeneity that’s difficult to escape from.

The blogosphere, as I mentioned earlier, seized on to the latest wave of emo, and albums like The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s debut Whenever, If Ever, and in 2014, the Hotelier’s Home Like NoPlace Is There and Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All becoming iconic indie rock records; emo became completely subsumed by the indie-industrial complex, Xeroxing successful formulas until the latest hype bands seemed like cartoonish parodies of what had come before, divorced from hardcore aesthetics and values in all but the most superficial fashion.

And of course, hardcore became its own beast as Code Orange Kids changed their name to Code Orange, releasing I Am King in 2014 and, along with other bands like Power Trip, becoming accepted members of the metal community. Hardcore probably fared the best of all of The Unified Scene’s various facets, as the bands that got big took special care to nurture new artists and cross-promote; I would argue that the recent wave of commingling DIY artists has a lot to thank hardcore (and, to a lesser extent, screamo) for in regards to introducing more varied influences and becoming a much more vibrant and diverse scene.

Although the future of the scene is up in the air— the waves of protests have fueled some of the most committed and steadfast political activism that these genres have seen in years, but the difficulties of dealing with any album cycles during this pandemic has hamstrung a lot of momentum— it’s hard not to feel like we’re going to come out of it in a good place, with a fresh and less regimented view on the cross-pollination of fans and band members. Still, as you can probably tell, I got extremely wistful and nostalgic for the era that I feel the Wonder Years defined throughout the course of the Depression Trilogy. It’s not dissimilar from how emo, hardcore, and certain strains of pop-punk and indie rock coexisted in the 90s, and although I’m excited to see it happen again, most of the older folks reading this know that you’ll always feel like the way the scene was when you first got into it was special, even if you can acknowledge its flaws.

So with all this in mind, long live the Wonder Years. I’ve seen them, I think, about 11 times since 2009 or so; their live show is still spectacular and I’m hoping for a hundred times more. The mixture of fans and the extreme dedication I saw at those shows has always awed me. For that blessed period from 2008 to 2013, they were the best pop-punk band in the world, uniting hardcore kids with brass knuckle tattoos, beanie-wearing pop-punkers who munched on burritos and pizza, and emo kids who obsessively downloaded out-of-print 90s records on Soulseek and spent hours alone in their room. They gave voice to that unique demographic but spoke to an audience even broader than that, creating converts and evangelicals themselves. And they reinvented the stagnant wheel of pop-punk into something so vital and exciting that even the rock critics who had turned pop-punk into a punching bag were forced to sit up and take notice. Not bad for a band that came out swinging from a South Philly basement.

-xoxo, Ellie

LATER THIS WEEK: A shorter but no less breathless examination of the Wonder Years’s brother band, Fireworks— in a lot of ways, the band that gave me permission to do all this bullshit to begin with. You don’t need maps when you know where the sidewalk cracks.

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