Taking Back Sunday

Performers

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  Taking Back Sunday

  Taking Back Sunday, who released their eighth studio album 152 in late 2023, often refer to themselves as the ‘luckiest guys you will meet.’ The new album, featuring 10 intensely vulnerable and absorbing new tracks was delivered with fresh ambition and a newfound purpose. It stands among the most genuinely reflective and emotionally pure efforts of Taking Back Sunday’s illustrious career.

  Starting out just hoping to release at least one album and go on tour, the band has since sold millions of albums, has multiple tracks with streams hitting the multiple hundred million mark, toured the world several times over, performed at all of the biggest festivals and are still always looking forward.

  Never ones to rest on their prior accomplishments or impressive back catalogue they are always striving to make something that they hope folks can find a little piece of themselves in. “Music is there to bring you together with like-minded people and get a little lost. For us, the songs from 152 have a life and energy all their own. It would make us the happiest if we can all get lost in it together.”

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  Thrice

  To emerge from a global pandemic with a renewed sense of situational awareness, hard won insight, and a new album is the kind of move we’ve come to expect from Thrice over the last twenty years. With Horizons/East, Dustin Kensrue and his bandmates address, with candor and courage, the fragile and awkward arrangements that pass for civilization, while inviting us to dwell more knowingly within our own lives. Without surrendering any of the energy and hard edge of their previous albums, they’ve given us a profoundly meditative work which serves as a musical summons to everyday attentiveness.
  
  Since forming Thrice with guitarist Teppei Teranishi, bassist Eddie Breckenridge, and drummer Riley Breckenridge in 1998, Kensrue has never been one to back down from a mental fight. This mood is set by the opening synth-driven number “Color of the Sky,” which sounds well-suited to accompany the closing credits of the Stranger Things season finale. Think Flying Lotus giving way to Elbow and setting the listener down in a new dimension. A self-recorded effort, Horizons/East conveys a palpable sense of danger, determination, and possibility. Scott Evans (Sleep, Kowloon Walled City, Yautja, Town Portal) is on mixing duties, conjuring a landscape of gloom, glow, and glory.
  
  On “Buried in the Sun,” which had the working title of “D.C. Bass,” the band’s fondness for bands like Fugazi and Frodus comes to the fore. In it we learn that there’s a military-industrial complex, a vast apparatus of legal bullying, to take on (I saw the fire on the television/the DoD or the CIA), but the threat to our mental health in acknowledging our own country’s participation in the terror trade is both immersive and interior. The psychic struggle will often come down to what we’re doing with our tools, how we hold what passes before our minds in dreams and on screens. There’s a lot to take in and a lot to be mad about, but Horizons/East invites us to slow tape and see.

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  Saves the Day

  NEW JERSEY vs THE WORLD

  savestheday.com