Motion City Soundtrack Announce First Album in 10 Years

This autumn, Minnesota quintet Motion City Soundtrack will return with their first new album. Their seventh album, ‘The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World’, will be released through Epitaph Records on September 19th.

Produced by Sean O’Keefe (Fall Out Boy, Plain White T’s), it will be the band’s first full-length since 2015’s ‘Panic Stations’. The band would go on a three-year hiatus in March 2016, before reuniting in 2019. Since then, they’ve released a handful of tracks, including ‘Crooked Ways,’, a cover of Fountains of Wayne’s ‘A Dip in the Ocean,’ and ‘Stop Talking’.

‘The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World’ will see vocalist/guitarist Justin Pierre, guitarist Joshua Cain, bassist Matt Taylor, keyboardist Jesse Johnson, and drummer Tony Thaxton reunite with renewed energy. Furthermore, it sees the five-piece recapturing the hunger of their early standout albums; 2003’s ‘I Am the Movie’ and 2005’s ‘Commit This to Memory’. “When we started conceptualising the idea for this record, I was thinking about what we loved about doing this originally,” Motion City Soundtrack guitarist Cain explains.

However, ‘The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World’ is far from a nostalgia trip, as it sees them experiment outside their comfort zone. At the same time, primary songwriter Justin Pierre looks to be as introspective as ever, albeit more assured. “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 admits. “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.”

Alongside their new single, ‘She Is Afraid,’ the album will feature guest appearances from Fall Out Boy‘s Patrick Stump, Citizen’s Mat Kerekes and Deanna Belos of Sincere Engineer.

The aforementioned ‘She Is Afraid’ is an instant reminder of MCS‘ hook-laden pop-punk with quirky lyrics. While its video is inspired by Apple TV+ show ‘Severance’.