Minnesota emo legends Motion City Soundtrack make a triumphant return with their first album in 10 years.
‘Is it too late to start again?’ ponders Justin Pierre on Things Like This, the brilliant penultimate song on Motion City Soundtrack’s first new album in 10 years. You can’t blame him for asking.
Adored as they were at the time of their unraveling in 2016, MCS were always slightly out of step with the music world they inhabited. A band who, after some excellent independent releases, marked their major label debut by delivering one of the best pop-punk albums ever in the form of 2010’s My Dinosaur Life. And then swiftly got dropped. A group, too, who sang about mental health in highly-specific, sometimes hilarious and often unflinching detail, but long before such open conversations became an accepted part of our daily lives. Motion City Soundtrack, it seemed, were just a bit too quirky for the straight-faced emo crowd, but also a bit too serious for the happy-go-lucky pop-punk scene to reach the critical mass they deserved.
But maybe, just maybe, 2025 will put an end to that. With the arrival of their excellent seventh album, The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World, there comes a long overdue chance to reappraise them. For their past achievements, yes. But also for what this album represents: a fresh start every bit as exciting.
First thing to note about TSOWWW: their time away has not rusted their razor-sharp musicianship or melodic hooks. Opener Some Wear A Dark Heart offers a gorgeous reintroduction, the sound of a wiser band reappearing after a great absence with a few more grey hairs and a lot on their mind, kinda like a particularly emo Moses coming back from the desert. But don’t let this mid-paced meditation fool you. She Is Afraid arrives straight afterwards to spark an onslaught of songs that see Justin’s assorted anxieties smothered in infectious melodies, crunching guitars and sprightly synth.
Of particular note is Particle Physics – co-written by, and featuring, Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump – which boasts a huge chorus and quickly establishes itself as an instant classic. Downer is, contrary to its name, very much an upper, while Bloodline rockets along so fast it’s a genuine shock when it ends… Did you just hit a time-dilating wormhole? Nope, it’s just a one-minute 41-second blur. There’s growth on display, too. Mi Corazon is the best example, its clanging bassline eventually giving way to spooky post-hardcore atmospherics. Will it be too leftfield for some fans? Perhaps. But it was a creative gamble well worth taking.
If one thing steals the show this time around, it’s Justin’s lyrics. Like Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, or even Clutch’s Neil Fallon, he is an utterly idiosyncratic songwriter – someone capable of wielding his trauma either as a sledgehammer or a precision-timed punchline. Particle Physics is one example. ‘What a party! Are you Finnish? What’s that book about? A man who thought his wife was a hat?’ he sings, somehow transforming this absurd eruption of words into an earworm. YKWTFWA, meanwhile, captures him delivering a stupendous poetic couplet like ‘Greetings from the abattoir / Defenders of the night collecting stars’ out of nowhere.
At other times, Justin divulges his inner-torment with a smile. Few people dissect emotions like him – not just raw feelings, but also the embarrassment of having them in the first place, the befuddlement of processing them, and the cursed attempts to purge them. ‘No software update can change a man, who wears a cardigan,’ he offers on Melancholia, that little rhyming addendum camouflaging the pain as a LOL. But with MCS v2.0 there is greater space for seriousness too, as Your Days Are Numbered hears him sing, ‘You can’t escape yourself, and no-one hurts like me’. It’s the mark of a band who know exactly when a joke is needed, and when to simply let a tortured feeling ring out.
At just 11 songs, the only foot MCS put wrong here is that TSOWWW is so concise, so deftly conceived, you almost wish the ride was longer. Then again, in a day and age where far too many album’s algorithm-appeasing tracklists are bloated beyond credibility, to get a honed set like this also feels special. A blush over 30 minutes it might be, but they’ve squeezed a lifetime of lessons into it.
‘I’m so sick of living the nostalgia down,’ Justin sings, bringing the title-track and, indeed, the record to an end. ‘I just want to separate the past from now, stay in the present tense somehow’. Well, it’s mission accomplished, gentlemen. Turns out that it’s never too late to start again.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Fall Out Boy, The Wonder Years, Weezer
The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World is out now via Epitaph
