New Found Glory’s New Album Explores Hardships, Triumph and More Songs About Girls

Pop punk isn’t dead. It’s just evolved, much like the bands themselves. New Found Glory’s new album, Resurrection, hits the mark between nostalgia and maturity, reminding fans why they started listening all those years ago.

Established in 1997 out of Coral Springs, Florida, New Found Glory (Jordan Pundik, vocals; Chad Gilbert, guitar; Ian Grushka, bass; and Cyrus Bolooki, drums) came into the scene when pop punk wasn’t quite a “thing” yet. They quickly gained a following and went from just another group of boys with guitars and a knack for storytelling to one of the most influential pop punk bands of that time period. Their teenage years were spent largely on the road, touring with their own musical idols like Blink-182 and Green Day.

Fast forward 17 years later and the guys are now in their 30s, some married, some with kids, still living out the dream of playing the music they love and getting paid to do it. And despite leaving behind their awkward teenage years long ago, New Found Glory still draws fans that are no older than they were when they got their start.

The band found a sweet spot in the pop punk scene with their emotionally charged, fast-paced sound that blends heartfelt pop lyrics with harder, more upbeat punk melodies. Younger fans appreciate their straightforward lyrics and relatable songs about the politics of relationships, including losing the girl, not getting the girl, and realizing the girl wasn’t so great after all. The band also sustains their longtime fans who can’t resist the guilty pleasure of a nostalgic ride into the days of teenage heartache and rebelling against…pretty much everything.

Like any resourceful pop punk band, New Found Glory is skilled at turning heartache and loss into the fuel that powers their creative process. Their eighth studio album, released on Oct. 7, 2014 through Hopeless Records, showcases a more mature take on overcoming hardship and coming out stronger in the end. Appropriately titled Resurrection, the album is a response to many of the challenges the band has faced since their last release in 2011, including parting ways with lyricist and guitarist Steve Klein, one of the band’s founding members, and changing record labels.

The album makes a strong start with the single “Selfless,” an anthem that sets the tone for the overarching vibe of this album: we’re not going to let anything get us down. The theme of power and triumph and rising up after hard times is especially strong in the title track: “These troubled times / Awoke my strength / So watch my / Watch my resurrection.”

“One More Round” can only be assumed to refer to the endless scrutiny and criticism bands face, especially online: “You’re a kid from the future, you’re passive and you’re afraid, sound so bold when you’re on paper, crumble when face to face.” As a band with more than 15 years in the spotlight, this likely is their response to the ever-fickle fans and critics.

And what New Found Glory album would be complete without the “songs written about stupid girls” ballads? The last few songs of the album fall thematically into stories about exes and relationships that were doomed to fail. “Degenerate” is a bit of advice to girls who fall for the wrong type of boys, while “Angel” is a dark but honest take on a relationship that ended eight years ago—and now serves as lyrical inspiration: “I guess lashing out makes it easier, something to sing about just makes it easier.”

Lyrically, even the songs about love take a more mature view on relationships, emphasizing sticking it out rather than giving up. From “Vicious Love”: “I could have given up a thousand times. In the past that was so easy.”

The common thread throughout the 13 tracks on this album revolve around coming to terms with adult life and making the best of whatever is thrown at you. Musically, many of these tracks are right on par with much-loved singles from Sticks and Stones and Catalyst, which will certainly be appreciated by fans from their early days.

Submerge got in touch with singer Jordan Pundik just before New Found Glory’s upcoming Sacramento show at Ace of Spades to hear a little more about the new album and how they’ve grown and matured over the years.

{Photo by Andy Foster}

The new album has definitely matured lyrically but overall it sounds very characteristic of New Found Glory. How has your music changed as you gained more life experiences and stories and what have you tried to keep the same?
I think we’re definitely more self aware, being older. When you’re young and on tour and on the road it’s like a fantasy world at times. Now that we’re older, a couple of us have kids, are married, or divorced and remarried. But we’ve always been a band to write about life experience, the human experience, and that’s where it stands now.

What kind of themes are you exploring that you haven’t really touched on before?
There’s a couple of relationship songs—we’ve always been a band to write about that—but it’s not like, oh I love this person, we broke up. It’s more like, we’ve been together for a while and we’ve been through some really rough shit and we make it through—or we don’t.
And then there are the other songs on the record about dealing with things that are sort of shitty in your life that knock you down, and it’s more about coming out of those things and becoming stronger from it.

Your fans are still a younger demographic. How are you getting younger fans to connect with the music?
I think it’s definitely writing about real things. I think people can connect with that. We’re not trying to hold ourselves higher than anybody else. And I think it has to do with the bands we take on tour and with our live shows—we don’t just stand around. We have a lot of energy.

You came into the scene when pop punk wasn’t so big. What trends have you noticed and how have things changed over the years?
I think it’s more the styles that bands are playing. Take The Wonder Years, for example. They’re a little bit not very polished and their lyrics are very heart-on-your-sleeve, and they’re more storytelling, and they are considered a love pop punk band in our scene.
Then you have bands like Wavves, and they’re super fuzzed out, write two-minute fun pop punk songs and people credit them as these indie masters, like at Coachella, but really at their core they’re a pop punk band. So I feel like there are different styles but it’s all kind of rooted in the same thing.

How have the crowds and your own fan base changed over the years?
There’s still always that dude in the back that started listening to us in ‘99 or 2000, the guys and girls that are hanging out in the back, singing along, but then in the front and in the pit you have a lot of young kids. And for some people that are just now getting into us, I think it’s really cool and says a lot to me that we’re still relevant.

Which songs do you still like to play from your earlier days?
I love playing more fast songs like “Understatement” and “All Downhill from Here.”

Are there any songs you really wish people would stop requesting?
“It Never Snows in Florida.”

What was it like being a teenager and seeing everything grow so quickly, gaining popularity doing what you loved?
That was before any of us were in relationships or had any big responsibilities, so we would be on tour 10 months out of the year. It’s crazy that most of my adult years were spent on tour. I only went to college for a semester, so I did a lot of my growing up on the road.

Did you guys get to do the normal high school type, teenage experiences?
I think we got to do it but on tour. Underage drinking, lighting shit on fire, blowing up port-a-potties…

So now that some of you have children, how has that changed your music or just the band dynamic?
Dynamically, we can kind of relate when we’re on tour together and gone for a few months. Not being able to see them is always hard and we have each other to talk to about that.
But even as far as just being in the band, now there’s a lot more at stake. As far as being able to sustain a life for them, this is what I do. It’s still as fun as ever, being on tour, recording records and meeting fans, and doing what we’ve always done, but it’s always in the back of my mind that there’s more at stake here.

So when do the kids get to start coming to shows and getting in the mosh pit?
My kids have been to the shows. They sit on the side of the stage and watch me.

Wow, they’re getting an early start.
They’re into it for a couple songs but then they want to get off the stage.

I imagine it’s harder now to find time to write and record as a group. What is the creative process like for writing the lyrics and creating the songs?
Especially with the new one, I was going up to Chad’s place—I live in San Diego and he lives in Los Angeles—at least once a week and writing with him in his kitchen. Once we finally had demos of songs that’s when we knew we were going to be recording and get everyone together.

That sounds much more collaborative than some bands I’ve talked to. Has it always been that way?
It’s always been a collaborative process. Obviously a song has to start somewhere, so someone will have a riff idea, or a melody idea, but then we get together and work it out.

Hardcore Progenitors Shai Hulud Are as Pissed-Off As Ever

There was a period of my early 20s when Shai Hulud’s second album, That Within Blood Ill-Tempered (a particularly scathing hardcore-metal hybrid in which the opening seconds of the first song features a brood of super-pissed guys screaming “Rest assured! This is sincere! This is true!”), was jammed in my CD alarm clock, set to 4:15 a.m. every weekday morning. Literally, jammed; the thing was broken, so I kind of didn’t have a choice but to listen to at least part of the album every single day.

Fox was all too full of information when he spoke with Submerge in anticipation of Shai Hulud’s Sacramento gig at Old Ironsides July 27, 2013. Here’s how it went down.

Reach Beyond the Sun is your fourth studio album; the band has endured a lot of lineup changes over the years. How do you feel that affects, if at all, creative consistency within the band?
I don’t think that the content has ever lost sight. Since the beginning, I was the one writing most of the songs. That’s not to say that other people involved haven’t contributed, because I would say that everybody that’s ever been in the band has contributed to every album we were working on at the time. I love collaboration and I love to bounce my ideas off someone and have somebody change them.

I think there’s a very strong thread of consistency throughout the music. Especially with the lyrics, because I’ve been the primary lyric writer since our first singer, Damien Moyal. When he joined, he wrote all the lyrics, and once we mutually parted with him, there was no one writing. I said I’d do it, I guess. I didn’t even know if there was anything I really wanted to say. It was kind of cool that I found out that I did. Not that I have anything worthwhile to say, but I found out that I have a lot to say.

It’s cool that it seems like it’s not a parameterbased project; that it’s malleable and you’re willing to fold things in and out.
Yeah it’s definitely malleable, and we always expand our parameters. I think we’ve done that on every album. Reach Beyond the Sun is probably our most emotional and pushes some boundaries into even hard rock. When I was in high school, Metallica was never played on the radio, now it is. “A Human Failing” I could see, maybe when things get a little more extreme on the radio 15 years from now, getting played on the radio. That’s definitely an extension of parameter for us, because we’ve never done that straight-forward of a song with really catchy parts in a rock structure. That said, I don’t think anyone’s ever gonna hear the next Shai Hulud album and say, “Are you kidding? That’s Shai Hulud?!” The flavors are expanded, but not to the point where we’d distort our original core.

You started with you not knowing if you had anything to say, and lo and behold you did. How has that grown for you over the last almost 20 years?
Geez, don’t say that number ever again… Just kidding. I would say the first thing that comes to mind is that now I won’t put anything to paper if it doesn’t mean anything. I developed into having something to say and trying to make a point, but I remember when I first started writing lyrics, as much as I hate to admit it, I could go back and find some lyrics from the Hearts Once Nourished…era and I don’t really know what the hell I was saying. I don’t know that there was really any type of point. I was just kind of putting incendiary words together and hoping that it meant something to someone. They weren’t stupid, but I didn’t think they had the big meaning.

On the new LP, you’d planned on reigning in the aggressiveness and technical aspects from Misanthropy Pure, right? What was the reasoning behind that?
I guess the goal with Misanthropy Pure was we wanted to write the heaviest, angriest, most pissed-off Shai Hulud album that we could. And making it angry had a lot to do with us speeding it up, making it heavier, making it trickier and making it less predictable. Because when something is less predictable, it comes off as chaotic. It was kind of like when Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth [paraphrasing] , “If you were to throw a frog into boiling water, the frog’s gonna scream and kick and jump out. But if you put a frog in water and slowly increased the temperature, the frog doesn’t really know.” That’s kind of what happened; we were so immersed in the water of Misanthropy Pure that the songs that started out as being very much like Shai Hulud songs now went, “Hey, what if we changed this part?” OK, sounds great. We’re in the water as it’s boiling, so we don’t even notice the difference. We didn’t realize that we’d taken it to the level that we did. Ultimately I think it’s our most brutal album, but it definitely lacks emotion, which is Shai Hulud’s strongest attribute, in my opinion. That’s what we’ve always gone for, and we lost sight of that. Chad noted that, [bassist Matt] Fletcher noted that, even I noted that after I took a step back with this album.

Can you talk a bit about how the dynamic of yourself, Chad and Fletcher manifested itself during the recording and writing of the new album? Since you’ve had that history together, what was it like to revisit that chemistry?
Chad didn’t come into the full picture until we went into pre-production. Although sometimes, I would send him complete songs and he’d say, “Let’s expand this…” or, “Oh, I like this line, we definitely need to repeat that line.” He’d send over his lines. On a side note, that’s the interesting part about working with a producer. A producer, as far as I’m concerned, can be anybody. It’s just somebody with an opinion. It’s a matter of whose opinion you want to let in. That’s what we let Chad do, for sure. I hadn’t hung out with Chad for years at that point. I had no idea what it would be like working with him again. When we were last in a studio, he was a young kid and he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. So we told him, “do this, do that” and he was 15, so he did what he was told. Now he’s a 32-year-old man…and he’s got opinions and he knows what he wants to do, and when he likes something. Even though I expected that, I never experienced it before. We argued like a family, and there were times when we very much disagreed and it was frustrating, but that’s happened between everybody. We went through it pretty smoothly and the dynamic of our personalities gelled so well that the result was the product that we had both hoped for.

His voice just mashes on the record. It’s an awesome thing for New Found Glory fans, for Chad Gilbert fans and definitely for people who have followed Shai Hulud for whatever amount of time. To hear Chad return is a pretty exciting thing. It worked out better than I anticipated.

Shai Hulud plays Old Ironsides Saturday, July 27, 2013. Opening is Early Graves, Summit and Soma Ras. For more information, please visit Theoldironsides.com.

Eisley Conquers Personal Strife in Time for Spring Tour

Even over the phone, Eisley’s Sherri DuPree has the sort of wide-eyed charm that will either make your eyes turn into giant cartoon hearts or cause you to vomit–depending on your kink. When Submerge spoke with the young singer/songwriter/guitarist and she cooed about a fan in Pittsburgh who’d brought the band “a friggin’ freezer full” of gourmet ice cream.

“It was awesome,” she added for emphasis.

It’s not difficult to see why Dupree and her group of fresh-faced Tyler, TX youths have garnered such an avid fan base. Eisley is the teddy-bear-cuddly antithesis to the aloof, iconic rock stars from the days of yore. They’re approachable; DuPree herself blogs regularly on the official Eisley home page, posting personal pictures and giving regular updates whether the band is at home or on the road. As a result, gifts like the freezer of frozen treats received in Pittsburgh are not out of the ordinary.

“The things we’ve been getting the most on this tour are the Starbucks Double Shot things in the can,” DuPree said. When asked if the frequency of these gifts had anything to do with a picture of herself drinking a can of the caffeinated beverage posted on her blog, Dupree answered, “That wasn’t what I was going for, but it totally worked.”

Though Dupree was in good spirits and easy to speak with, since the release in Aug. 2007 of Eisley’s latest album, Combinations, her personal life has had it’s ups and downs. The end of 2007 saw her marriage to New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert end in divorce. At around the same time, Sherri’s sister and bandmate Chauntelle broke her engagement with Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazarra. Sherri said that though the experience was very painful, now that time has passed, she sees it as a positive one.

“I’m happy now, and it’s great,” she said. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

DuPree explained that having a sibling go through a similar ordeal gave both sisters someone to rely on through their difficult times .
“My deal went down…and the guy who was going to marry her [Lazarra] was saying, ‘I can’t believe Sherri’s husband is doing this to her, leaving her’ and talking all this trash about him, and then [a couple of months later] he ended up doing the same thing,” DuPree said.

“Now it’s funny because we’re through it,” DuPree went on to say. “But at that time, our worlds were thrown upside down. We totally had each other to lean on. It was really helpful for both of us that it happened at the same time, because we both could understand each other so well.”

Other than being a learning experience, DuPree said her marital woes also helped her grow as a writer.

“When you go through something that intense emotionally, you’re pushed to grow in every part of your life,” DuPree explained.

In the time off Eisley had leading up to their spring tour (which got under way on Apr. 1 and will carry through May 24, including a stop at The Empire in Sacramento on May 13), DuPree said that she and sister/bandmate Stacy had been writing new material. Sherri said that the group has already demoed between 17 and 20 songs on Garageband, though at present time there were no definite plans for when the group would re-enter the studio.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to go to the studio pretty soon–maybe after the summer’s over–and record something, even if it’s just an EP,” she said.

Though a new Eisley album is still just on the distant horizon, DuPree said the material she had been writing had been a lot more guitar heavy and believed that their next release would be, “a little more heavy–more rock” than the group’s previous efforts.

“It’s dorky, but I love playing loud guitar,” she said with a laugh. “‘Many Funerals’ [from Combinations] is one of my favorite songs to play because it’s one of our heaviest songs, so it’ll be fun having a few more [like that].”

DuPree admitted that the more aggressive guitar parts she’d been writing may have been a result of the dissolution of her marriage to Gilbert, and that her divorce would affect the lyrics for the new material as well. However, she was quick to point out that the group wouldn’t be abandoning their softer side.

“There will definitely be love songs too because that’s always how it’s going to be,” she said.