'2 Young 2 Die'

Jake: I wrote this one super early into quarantine. It was the first week when no one knew what the fuck was going to happen, and everything was really terrifying. I brought all my recording shit home and I would just smoke cigarettes and write songs all night. I was existentially confused about my place in the world, as a musician, thinking maybe I should kill that part of myself. And also just feeling guilty for existing. I think everyone feels like that for the most part, like they’re not worth it. Everyone also feels invincible at the same time. It’s just this universal thing we all deal with.

'Blew Its'

Nathan: this song is about the relationship of minormajor (mM7, mΔ7, −Δ7) and in particular the satisfaction in the resolve after those differing intervals clash for a second or two.

'Ashtray' 

Nathan: Everything’s good until you smoke a fuck-ton-full bag of cigarettes. This one’s about being on a sinking ship...I think…

'Bang Bang'

Jake: This was a demo that I started in 2019. I wrote the riff on guitar and then put in some synths and structured the lyrics about things I didn’t wanna deal with. I was in a long-distance relationship for a long time and I knew that it wasn't working. But instead of us talking about it, we ignored it. It was a situation where our attraction to each other caused us to neglect all the very logical issues that were at hand. 

'Semi Pro'

Jake: 'Semi Pro' was the last song added to the record. We went on vacation with our [touring] crew in the summer of 2020. I was talking to our monitor tech, Geron about the pandemic, and he was saying that he wanted to get out of the music game because Covid had been so hard and everything was unstable. It struck me in this really crazy way because all the shit that we do is literally meaningless in the grand scope of things. When the chips are down, playing a guitar is not really worth anything. 

The song essentially is about quitting. It’s an athlete metaphor — where somebody spent a long time in the game, seeing themselves age out of it, and then making peace with that and being OK. And furthmore recognising the ways that you are tied to your craft can really fuck with your head. 

It took a global pandemic and falling in love to help me find an identity outside of music and in that I finally feel free as an artist. 

'Ride or Die'

Jake: It’s more about the way the words go with the melody than the words themselves. It’s one of my favorite songs on the record — you can really hear everyone in the band doing their thing. It’s about wanting to find a partner who would do anything for you. 

'Scorpio'

Nathan: Gatorade is only as good as our thirst for it. Getting freaky with incompatible star signs. Our appetite for destruction sometimes gets the best of us.

'Listerine'

Nathan: We all got plaque. You might have a problem; you might be the problem. You can’t get it fixed by yourself, despite how hard you try.

'Boys'

Jake: To me, 'Boys' is bottoming out, sort of reaching your lowest point mentally. And because you're there, you assess everything around you, and then become a better person. It was about this party I went to where I had all these crazy experiences and then woke up feeling like 'I need to change my life right now'. The next day I went to New York and came back, hung out with our new manager, and felt slightly better. It's like that feeling when you're drunk and then you wake up hungover and you hate yourself.

Nathan: It was really frustrating, trying to figure out that chorus and like how deep into that you wanted to go. It was just — the moment was showing itself to me. I was like, this is the 'work' part of this job. This is the reckoning kind of shit. And it was kind of hilarious, because it's just I don't know, I was probably hungover, and I was just like, what am I doing with my life? Like, what's happening here? 

And I feel like New York...everybody has a relationship with that city, whether you've been or you haven't, and I think that it just occupies such a big space in everybody's brain and heart that you can't capture it. You can't really memorialize it or erect some sort of statue to it in your psyche. I feel like it’s just always escaping you. It's always one step ahead of you, and you have to embrace that fact and just keep walking. No matter how fucked up last night was, you know.

Jake: It’s also about exploring sexuality, and the elusiveness of it. I’ve always felt that sexual preference is something that exists beyond the binary. At different points in your life you feel different ways, and that’s ok. In this track we’re kind of comparing that journey to our first trips to NY. It’s this huge place that is always moving past us while we’re trying to grab a hold of it. 

Nathan: That's why it fades out, too. I love that song for how it's just immediately different and unlike anything else we’ve made. And there's a lot of moments recording that song that were really, really fucking satisfying like that. And it was like a one and done thing that was like 'I can't recreate that ever again'. And it's just nice when things work out like that.

'Understand'