Southern California quintet Yellowcard are in the closing stages of recording their fifth LP, the follow-up to their 2003 breakthrough, Ocean Avenue. Frontman Ryan Key believes that, with this as-yet-untitled album, slated for release early next year, his band is growing up.
"It's so different from the record we put out before," says Key. "The songs have lost that adolescent bounciness -- they've come into adulthood a bit. I mean, there are more things to write about that matter as an adult than there were when we were 19, 20, writing Ocean Avenue."
When it came time for the band to set to work on the new record, principle songwriters Key and bassist Pete Mosely decamped to New York to unwind and write.
"We just kind of explored a little bit," says Key. "There were a lot of late nights, a lot of coming home when the sun was coming up -- Not for the sake of getting rowdy, but more because we'd been stuck in a bus for nineteen months and hadn't had a chance to live in a normal social environment at all. Obviously, there's going to be a bit of culture shock moving to New York in the winter, but it brought out some darker places in us. And that's not in a 'now I'm going to start wearing eyeliner' kind of way, but emotionally darker."
On the darker side of the Yellowcard palate is the new song "Two Weeks From Twenty." "That stretched the limits for us," says Key. "It's this jazz-lounge anti-war song. You're listening to this super-smooth, jazzy groove, but we're talking about something that means a lot to us -- and that's really cool. It's more intense subject matter than we've ever tried to tackle."
Different, too, is "Lights and Sounds," a no-frills rocker that kicks off the album. "It was written really late in the process, and it's got such an amazing, driving, rock-&-roll vibe to it, with none of that frickin' pop-punk stigma," says Key. "It's just a great rock song. That's something we've been striving to write for a long time, so when we were done, it was a relief: 'We wrote a great rock song!'"