Review Summary: Just wait and see—one day I’ll disappear and you’ll be just like me.
Pop punk comprises a vanishingly small percentage of my music consumption these days. Loath as I am to make a cliche statement like, “I outgrew the genre,” I definitely can’t ignore the fact that it doesn’t hit the same for me at thirty-six as it did in my early adult years. And yet, Motion City Soundtrack (and only a few other pop punk acts) manages to cross that distance, and I find myself once again caring about the genre—even if only for the duration of a full-length album.
Maybe it’s Justin Pierre’s lyrics, which are often full of wry observations and sardonic humour about anxiety, relationships, getting older, and just generally being a little bit of a mess in life. In that way, MCS feels like a band that grew up with their fans, as opposed to continuing to draw from the same rote playbook as so many are wont to do. And yet, sonically, nothing’s really changed over the past twenty-plus years. With The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World you’re still getting the familiar fizzy riffs and sugary hooks that you did on their older material. Early on, “Particle Physics” makes that crystal clear: an unabashedly fun, nerdy jam with one of the most immediate and satisfying hooks they’ve written in years, just playful and energetic in all the right ways. That sugar high doesn’t fade when they shift into the self-assured “You Know Who the *** We Are,” where the titular line sounds more like a smirk than posturing. “Don’t waste our time/we embrace the avant garde” is silliness and self-awareness wrapped in bravado. It might rub the wrong way if it were another band, but here it lands thanks to the sort of confidence you get from decades of self-deprecation.
That looseness helps give the record some room to breathe, but it can also make it seem bog standard at first glance. Fortunately, tracks like “Mi Corazon” emerge as these emotional counterweights, dropping the sardonic filter for something more direct and serious. It’s tender without spilling over into the saccharine, and its placement helps to sort of reorient the album a bit, reminding the listener that Pierre can still write a powerful, all-serious song when he wants to. Elsewhere, Melancholia, Your Days Are Numbered, and Bloodline help keep the pace lively and hooky, as well as make those more serious beats like “Mi Corazon” and “Some Wear a Dark Heart” more balanced.
And then there’s the title track, which confronts existential dread and ruminations on life and death. More than that, the track plays with the push/pull of the present: “Dig into the here and now/stay in present tense somehow,” contrasted by, “We’re so psyched to put on the nostalgia crown.” That duality is part of the emotional core: time is both a blessing and a curse, and that friction between the two is where meaning is fought for. MCS have dealt with similar themes before, but this is a sort of “wiser” existentialism, if you will: it still prods you to ask questions, but you don’t just assume you’ll find neat little answers along the way.
Perhaps it’s unfair and maybe even a little perplexing to say MCS is an exception to the genre’s tendency toward arrested development. I mean, this IS still very much within their comfort zone. They’ve never been ones to reinvent their sound, but it’s how they frame it through the lens of aging and ongoing self-discovery that grounds it in something more relatable and tangible. While many pop punk bands leaned hard into either the kind of bratty rebellion that defined bands like Blink-182 and New Found Glory or the straight-up nostalgia of bands like All Time Low, MCS consistently threads humour and neurosis into their songs, which makes them still resonate with me even as I approach forty. Nothing on here is going to make detractors suddenly click with the band, but fans of their past output will revel in some tightly crafted pop punk songs that feature big hooks, crisp production, and a sense of subtle but continued maturity.
Things change, time finds a way
To take what we used to have
The people that we lost and loved
And adorations undeserving of
Black matter calls us all
Now closer with every day
The family we now define
Is all we have until the end of time
