Ten Whole Wonder Years

It’s been a decade since The Wonder Years released The Greatest Generation. A landmark of the genre, it’s the final installment in a trilogy of albums that cemented the band forever in the pop-punk pantheon. I loved them the second “Local Man Runs Everything” ripped through my sixteen-year-old sense of self, and every album since their 2013 opus has made me feel incredibly lucky to live the same world.

I was seventeen and afraid of the future when this album came out swinging. Sitting in my parents basement, history book open on my lap, the album’s cathartic centerpiece, “The Devil In My Bloodstream” hit and I just wept. I cannot remember a time before that moment when my first encounter with a song moved me to tears.

I was not a better person at 17. I did not live in a better world. I am not immune to nostalgia, but I am not interested in returning to that time. Our English teacher once said there was no sum of money in the world anyone could pay him to relive adolescence. I think all the time of the tweet, “Reincarnation better not be real, I’m not doing this shit again.”

The album is bangers front to back, and I want to take the time to zero in on track 3, “We Could Die Like This”. I don’t think it ranks highly as a fan favorite, and is sadly seated between the album’s two monstrously good singles—songs that have gotten referenced and repurposed on multiple subsequent albums, and are played at almost every single live show. According to setlist.fm it’s only been played live 14 times, which along with “An American Religion (FSF)” and “Teenage Parents” makes it one of the rarest TGG cuts on the band’s setlists.

Mike Kennedy may be a bad friend, but he is maybe my favorite drummer alive. He just tears through this song with such insane abandon. It constantly sounds like the wheels are about to come off, yet his control of the kick drum is unmatched. The fill at the 3:20 mark makes me foam at the mouth with excitement. The drums add such chaos to the straightforward angst anthem chorus.

It’s the first song on the album to imagine a future—and it’s not exactly bright. Openers, “There, There” and “Passing Through A Screen Door” are primarily concerned with the present tense, and stagnation. “We Could Die Like This” does a fantastic dance between childhood memories and a reverie of self-damnation.

I’ve thought about the line, “If I die, I wanna die in the suburbs”, for so long. “IF”? Buddy, it’s a question of when! I love the accidental invincibility the word choice grants. As if death were a problem with a syntactical solution.

The album’s tongue-in-cheek title should give you an idea of how the band feels about nostalgia. The past is riddled with hard-love memories of sleeping around kerosene stoves, losing friends to addiction, and generational trauma.

I think this song holds the album’s central tension: when the past is not a pillow one can cling to, the future feels foreclosed. So much of The Wonder Years’ early works are about escape, but TGG acknowledges the simple destination of “anywhere but here” isn’t the panacea pop-punk promised. There is a sick comfort in the familiar oblivion of a suburban snow-shovel heart attack. We return to the places and people that harm us because we feel we have nowhere else to go.

Bassist Josh Martin always gets to growl the hardest lines, and his bridge on “We Could Die Like This” doesn’t disappoint.

I’ve thought of this song almost every time something terrible has happened. A friend once told me “Life is an endless march of losses.” They weren’t wrong. These days turning the calendar fills me with dread.

There is a temptation to fetishize our own suffering and pain. To believe our suffering makes us good, or better, or vulnerable and therefore deserving of assurance and healing. Some shit just sucks, and it’s not like I didn’t know that when I first heard the song, but it busted some of the assumptions I had passively accepted about the genre and music as a whole. This song sounded like what I loved, and spoke to what I hated about my life beyond the petty grievances of adolescence. Some of the people with whom I first shared this album aren’t here anymore. There’s nothing I can do about that. Though the songs stay the same.

There’s a lot to love about TWY’s latest record, and it revisits many of the themes and songs of The Greatest Generation while offering some hard-won wisdom. “Old Friends Like Lost Teeth” feels like an answer to “We Could Die Like This”. That bridge goes so hard; I have hurt my neck headbanging to it several times.

The future doesn’t always seem bright, and The Wonder Years know it, but it is inevitable and we might as well be there to make it a little better for ourselves and our loved ones.

I might be a broken record at this point. Sometimes history repeats itself. Sometimes the record skips.