Motion City Soundtrack, the longtime Minneapolis-based emo and pop-punk band led by Justin Pierre, have announced their first new album in a decade. The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World is their seventh studio album, and it’s due out September 17 via Epitaph. Check out the lead single “She Is Afraid,” and its Severance-inspired music video, below.
Recorded with Sean O’Keefe at Chicago’s Electrical Audio, The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World spans 11 tracks and features guest appearances by Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, Citizen’s Mat Kerekes, and Sincere Engineer’s Deanna Belos. Technically, “She Is Afraid” isn’t Motion City Soundtrack’s first new song since reuniting; last year, the band contributed the original number “Stop Talking” to the coming-of-age movie Didi.
Barely a year after their last album, 2015’s Panic Stations, Motion City Soundtrack broke up, with various members relocating to different states and Pierre pursuing a solo career. The full band–Pierre, guitarist Joshua Cain, bassist Matt Taylor, keyboardist Jesse Johnson, and drummer Tony Thaxton—reunited on New Year’s Eve 2019, and snuck in a proper tour at the start of 2020 before the pandemic struck. That’s when Motion City Soundtrack started conceptualizing the idea for this new album.
“I think that if you look at a lot of our past records, it’s about ‘What’s wrong? What am I not getting right? Why do I feel fucking crazy? Why can’t I figure this out’… and I figured it out,” Pierre said in a statement. “It’s almost like I felt I didn’t have an identity [in the past] and now by working through the hard stuff, I know who I am.”
