Taking Back Sunday’s new album, “152,” may be a turning point for the long-running alternative rock band. In reshaping the energetic emo/indie rock sound that was established on the band’s popular 2002 debut album, “Tell All Your Friends,” the new album offers the kind of musical leap rarely seen from bands with as much history as Taking Back Sunday.
The musical growth didn’t happen by accident. After going through a series of personnel changes between 2003 and 2010, original members John Nolan (guitar) and Shaun Cooper (bass) returned to Taking Back Sunday. The first album from the reunited early lineup, a 2011 self-titled effort, stuck close to the emo-ish guitar rock of “Tell All Your Friends.” But then the band members began hinting at some new musical directions on 2014’s “Happiness Is” and 2019’s “Tidal Wave” — becoming less concerned with conforming to an expected sound and leaning more into just writing songs they found exciting.
And when Taking Back Sunday got sidelined from touring by the COVID pandemic, Cooper, Nolan, singer Adam Lazzara and drummer Mark O’Connell had time to take stock of what they want the band to be musically and fully commit to pushing forward creatively.
“We have had a lot of time to think through the pandemic. We were kind of home sitting on the couch and hoping that the world would somehow get back to normal,” Cooper said. “You do a lot of soul searching and stuff and think about what you want the band to be and the general consensus (in the band) is we hadn’t hit our peak yet. And a lot of people say ‘Oh, that’s crazy, like you guys peaked in 2005.’ Well, if we believed that we wouldn’t still be here doing the thing. Us as artists, as songwriters, musicians, we all feel like we’ve evolved considerably and we want to examine that and put it into practice when we’re working on these songs.”
Of course, wanting to reinvent a band’s sound and actually finding ways to do so are two different things.
For Taking Back Sunday, a key moment in meeting the goal arrived when EDM star Steve Aoki contacted the band about collaborating on a song that became “Just Us Two.” At that point, the band had been writing songs for “152,” but hadn’t landed on a direction for the album or zeroed in on a producer for the project.
“Our good friend and legendary DJ Steve Aoki came to us, and he had been wanting to work with us on a song back in 2019,” Cooper said. “And we couldn’t get it done until, I guess it was 2021, maybe the beginning of 2022. We got in the room with him and he had this amazing engineer, Tushar Apte. We said we don’t know who this guy is, but he is an amazing artist and the speed at which he works and his creative ideas, his direction, how he can put everything together and how he understands what we provide as a band and as individuals that makes Taking Back Sunday, can we get this guy to produce our record?”
The band wondered if Apte, who had mainly worked in the pop arena, would want to work with a rock act like Taking Back Sunday. But it turned out he’d been wanting for some time to produce a rock album. So Apte signed on to produce “152.”
It quickly became clear that the band’s instincts about the partnership with Apte were spot on.
“It was just such an exciting time to see the synergy we had together. It’s all greater than the sum of its parts when we were in the room working with him and I feel like he really understood what we did,” Cooper said. “He really understood that we wanted to reimagine our sound, but we didn’t want to stray too far from what we are. And he really acknowledged that and did a great job of funneling our rock music through his pop sensibility, and there you have ‘152.’
The band’s intentions are apparent with the opening track on “152,” “Amphetamine Smiles.” Instead of blasting off behind big electric guitars — a typical opening salvo from earlier Taking Back Sunday albums — the song eases in behind acoustic guitars and sweet synthesizer lines before blossoming into a rich mid-tempo track. Taking Back Sunday’s melodic abilities also shine on “The One” (which has a bit of an epic U2 touch), “I’m The Only One Who Knows You” (which started out as a punky rocker before being transformed into a spacious ballad) and the potent mid-tempo track “New Music Friday.” Meanwhile, “Keep Going,” “S’old,” and “Lightbringer” bring the familiar rock energy, while still delivering melodic punch.
While “152” is still a rock album, the pop influences that are more pronounced than ever on the album weren’t foreign to Taking Back Sunday, either.
“We’re all pop music fans. We all really like Post Malone. We think he’s awesome. We all listen to Taylor Swift,” Cooper said. “I saw Harry Styles live with my family and he put on an amazing show. I love that record ‘Harry’s House.’ It’s incredible. I listen to the band Haim. I think they’re tremendous in how they kind of fuse pop and rock music and there’s just so many hooks. And I mean, we’re going back to revisiting a lot of 80’s stuff like Don Henley’s solo stuff is just tremendous, Phil Collins. Whitney Houston. So we’re like how can we incorporate this into our Long Island hardcore roots? It’s always kind of been the thing, we’ve been fans of that music. So I think we felt free to kind of explore that.”
In addition to bringing a pop sensibility to the proceedings and tightening up song arrangements, Apte was also instrumental in helping Taking Back Sunday infuse their guitar-centered sound with an array of different instrumental/sonic elements and textures that add considerable color throughout “152.”
“Sonically it’s a different kind of thing for us. There are so many different elements that you’ve never heard on the Taking Back Sunday record,” Cooper said. “It’s the four guys that have brought in all the Taking Back Sunday records. That kind of element is still there, that kind of songwriting, four guys in a room, with just kind of an elevated sound. But hopefully we’ve improved as musicians and songwriters, our musical choices that we make when we’re playing our guitars, bass, drums and vocals, everything has matured with us.”
Taking Back Sunday will spend much of the rest of the year on tour, and songs from “152” will be featured in the shows.
“We’re so proud of the record that we’re going to play a decent amount of it,” Cooper said. “Maybe we’re going to switch it up some nights and then put in some different songs from it and stuff, but I would say (we’ll play) maybe four or five (new) songs probably every night. The songs are relatively short, too. So if you don’t know them just yet, they’ll be over relatively quickly and we’re going to fire back with something that you may be a little bit more familiar with.”
Taking Back Sunday is performing at the Union Event Center on June 11th, find tickets here.
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