Taking Pop Sunday. After almost 2,600 days since the release of Tidal Wave in 2016, Long Island alt rockers Taking Back Sunday choose modern pop over alternative, making their triumphant return to the scene with 152. And it worked wonders. Eight years of absence is a lengthy time off for any musician, all the more so for a band approaching a quarter of a century of age—and boy did a revolution and a half take place during those years. Both societally and for the band members. Inter alia, the American outfit celebrated the twentieth birthday of both the band as a whole (2019) and their trailblazing studio debut Tell All Your Friends (2022) with corresponding deluxe record reissues, peppered one-off non-album singles here and there—including a cover of Weezer‘s “My Name Is Jonas“, an improbable co-sign with the Wu Tang Clan, and the late-stage emo wet dream “Love You a Little” assisting both The Maine and Charlotte Sands—and let go their longtime founding member Eddie Reyes (2018). Crucially, considering how their second coming of a self-titled turned out to be, last year TBS also unexpectedly partnered with megastar DJ Steve Aoki, an unlikely long shot that yielded the sticky and defiant dance-rock number “Just Us Two“.
Such a link up was a sole degree of separation from glossy pop production extraordinaire Tushar Apte, who ended up getting enlisted to orchestrate and execute the group’s eight studio album in its entirety. Side-kicked by Neal Avron on mixing engineering duties, the Australian sound crafter—whose previous production pedigree includes BTS, Blackpink, Nicki Minaj, and Adam Levine amongst others—ended up exerting a perhaps greater musical moulding than any other producer TBS previously worked with. Each of the ten records bundled as part of this full length is enveloped in a thick membrane of sanitization unprecedented for the outfit. Even on grittier and more punk-adjacent cuts, such as the fierce and galloping second and forth single respectively (“S’old“ and “Keep Going“), there permeates a layering of lavishness as well as a tender loving care for sound that only a mystical mind such as Apte’s could instil into the pioneering alt rock quartet’s imprint. Conversely, a juxtaposition contributing to arguably the single biggest success factor of this project, lead singer Adam Lazzara’s lyrical flair remained as disarrayed and perturbed as ever, aptly demonstrated on the aforementioned fourth teaser track: “You could forget about the devil / But the devil won’t forget about you / Just because you’re winning / That don’t mean you’ve got nothing to lose“.
As a whole, 152 sounds big, expansive, and very polished. Musically and recording-wise, this half hour and change committed to tape stands as an outing more akin to the latest Thirty Seconds to Mars record, than say this year’s Paramore or Foo Fighters rock and roll canon offerings. Yet once again, perhaps counterintuitively, this is not a bad thing for TBS. For they pulled this off. With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, the electronic and dance-affine sonic leakages on “Just Us Two” last year now resplend as a true blue litmus test for it all—a canary in the coalmine of sorts. Two of the album’s highlights, the gentle soft pop touch of “Lightbringer” at number seven and climactic soaring coda “The Stranger“, are washed up in synthesisers, clean effects, and pitch-correctors. This is something flat out unthinkable if one is to call back to their last record in time Tidal Wave—a no-frills affair dabbling in early punk tendencies and heartland rock inclinations. Well, perhaps unpopularly so, 152 is an overall better album than Tidal Wave.
Don’t take it from us, you ask the core fans. Correcting for recency bias handicap, their reception and hype so far for the new record seem to be at their most glowing since the quartet’s 2011 self-titled, a record that brought the original Tell All Your Friends line-up back together—drafted today counting Lazzara on vocal duties, John Nolan on guitars/keyboards/BVs, Shaun Cooper on bass guitar, and Mark O’Connell on drums and percussions. Case in point, as part of the Concord-distributed Fantasy Record’s sneak peek listening party that took place a few days before the album’s street date on 27th October, the label saw itself forced to go back for seconds to give the full playthrough another unplanned spin, on the heels of thunderous positive vox populi in webchat. Having attended said event first-hand, we can attest that particularly the aforementioned “Lightbringer” and the sticky groove of Spotify SEO-finessing “New Music Friday” struck as immediate first-listen standouts (aside of course from the four previously available singles).
Clocking in as the shortest LP in TBS’s discography—Tidal Wave, their longest, has almost twenty more minutes of material by comparison—152 is groomed by mainstream pop formulas through and through. Fascinatingly, there seems to be a runtime sweet spot optimized around 3:15 of playback, with as many as six out of ten tracks adopting the format—if this isn’t pop craftsmanship down to a T, then we don’t know what is. Even more intriguingly so, all these songs happen to make up the core backbone of the record, by being evenly woven along the ten-slotted tracklist. As a net positive externality, less constrained than inspired by similar machinery blueprints, Lazzara and Nolan found ways to muster up enough wherewithal to step up their lyrical game. Whether it’s post-mess up regret bars on the musically lukewarm intro “Amphetamine Smiles” (“Half-drunk Messiah with a smile on her face / She told me not to take them pills / I said “Girl, you got no faith in medicine“), romantic liberation on arena-sized lead single “The One” (“Now I’m close enough to reach you / All the walls that I could see through / Still, the words that I can’t say go on and on“), or free mundane mad libs-like associations on “Quit Trying” (“Something safe words make you vibrant / Northern lightning, ultra violet / I just quit trying“).
With all that being said, the best song on the album is “I Am the Only One Who Knows You“. Sequenced halfway through at number five, the tune not only has the most convincing songwriting at its core, but everything enveloping it, from its execution to individual performances and production, is of a spotless persuasion as well. On the track, lines such as “Keep ’em out, let ’em in / Unrepentant, unforgiven / Holy hell, high heaven / It’s a destination wedding” and “Give a smile, give a nod, find yourself / Find your god, holy hell / Tell yourself it’s a match made in heaven” transcend even the most literate of Lazzara’s sometimes corny lyrical leanings of the past, thrusting them into more legitimate poetic waxing conversations. Meanwhile, Apte’s white glove production is ethereal, formidable, and immaculate. As a big plus, something about this cut’s X factor makes it one of (if not the) most easily listenable songs in the band’s entire catalogue—no matter a listener’s walk of life. Sure-fire classic potential, hands down.
Yet by no means is this a pitch perfect album. While not enough credit could possibly ever be given to TBS for going so pop with this—lest we forget, they had something to the effect of a scene crown on their emo veteran heads to lose—there are lowlights to be found on this thing. For one, album opener “Amphetamine Smiles” feels like a misstep placed where it is, at least musically. This is the one instance where Apte’s radio-ready production chops didn’t translate as well on a creatively raw, acoustic, and soulfully unplugged composition. It’s also neither fish nor fowl as it builds up into a more traditionally rock track on its back-end, never quite managing to shake off a somewhat subpar packaging. We would’ve loved to have heard this on Tidal Wave instead. Along similar lines, the intentional pop dimension adopted on 152—led by such guiding principles as brevity, punch, and conciseness—could’ve caused certain tracks to leave listeners wanting more from them. Particularly on “Lightbringer” and the undeniably sticky “Juice 2 Me” as penultimate on the tracklist, the feeling is that both could’ve used more fleshing out, and that an even better song lurked beneath the glossier surface of theirs that ended up making the cut.
No harm, no foul—overall, for TBS this is not just an A for effort, but it’s also an A- in execution and output. Handily one of their best albums hitherto. Undoubtedly an outlier in the band’s discography. Here’s to hoping Adam, John, Shaun, and Mark keep on leaning in, pushing this new-found creative endeavour further and further in projects to come, without taking another eight years whilst at it. After all, TBS is back with new material after almost a decade (without the influence), their handsome faces are slapped on the album’s front cover for the first time, and in Fantasy they have finally found a record label that genuinely supports and elevates them. Chances are they now feel comfortable enough to keep scratching their true artistic itches going forward—irrespective of scene, industry, and peer pressures. For what it’s worth, best we can do as fans is to keep not treating TBS like a stranger.
We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.
AV
TAKING BACK SUNDAY
152
2023, Fantasy Records
Everything Must Swing 