Yep, that's right The Get Up Kids are back with new music. Missed the announcement? Everything you need to know is right here. And yeah, it's fair to say we're stoked. Because their old music is all kinds of excellent. Over to Kerrang! writer Mischa Pearlman, to explain why their breakthrough 1999 album, Something To Write Home About, was exactly that and then some.
The recent news that The Get Up Kids, after some seven years, will be releasing new music imminently, made my heart jump with joy. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t played their last album, 2011’s There Are Rules, in years. I couldn’t even tell you how any of its songs go. It’s not that it was a bad record, but it was an album that tried too hard to not be a Get Up Kids record, to escape the trappings of that ever contentious, nebulous term ‘emo’ – the genre for which they became accidental, temporary standard-bearers before it was once again mutated and modernised by the likes of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.
I got into the band in the most clichéd and appropriate way a guy could possibly get into The Get Up Kids – through a mixtape, back when people still made mixtapes. I’d become friends with a girl in the States and she sent me a cassette with a whole bunch of awesome punk bands on Side A, including Alkaline Trio, The Impossibles, The Promise Ring, Braid and Green Day’s At The Library, along with a load of others I’ve long since forgotten. Side B, however, contained Four Minute Mile, The Get Up Kids’ debut album, which I guess had just come out a few months before in April 1997. I was an instant fan: to this day, Shorty remains one of my favourite ever songs, and I still know every lyric to every track on that album, and hearing them still gives me goosebumps.