Yellowcard - Better Days
Yellowcard
Better Days
Release Date: October 10, 2025
Label: Better Noise
In 2017, Yellowcard swore that they were done. No records, no tours, nothing. They even released a final self-titled album and did a farewell tour, claiming that they had gone as far as they could with the band. Now, I no longer believe it when any band says that they have no more gas left in the tank. Sometimes, they just need to make a pit stop for a few years before getting back on the highway. Eight years later, Yellowcard is back with perhaps the best album they’ve released in decades, Better Days. The Jacksonville, FL quartet sounds reinvigorated throughout all ten songs that make up their eleventh studio album, with songs rivaling those of the tracks on Ocean Avenue and Lights And Sounds.
The album’s eponymous opening track is electrifying and one of their best, reflecting on nostalgia and a yearning for the past with an anthemic chorus amidst a driving guitar line. “honestly i” finds Sean Mackin’s virtuosic violin work against a booming drum beat that leads into a track that would feel right at home on any Blink-182 record. This statement makes sense - Blink’s powerhouse drummer Travis Barker lent his producer abilities to Better Days, along with playing drums on every track on the album. Barker is perhaps the best drummer in this scene, and his presence only helps accentuate every song.
The circle-pit-inducing “Love Letters Lost” features a guest vocal spot from Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba, while “You Broke Me Too” slows things down with a ballad-like entry featuring a powerful guest appearance from Avril Lavigne. “City of Angels” opens with a plucking synth line before diving into a love letter to what I can only assume is Los Angeles. It can be cliché for a rock band to write a song about Los Angeles and Hollywood, “the city of hopes and dreams”, but here, it’s cliché that works effectively.
“Bedroom Posters” and “Skin Scraped” keep the traditional pop-punk energy going before Better Days heads into far more emotional territory on “Barely Alive”. Vocalist Ryan Key sings in a lower register on the verses, juxtaposed against a soaring chorus that laments lost love. This moment is followed by “Big Blue Eyes”, the album closer and a sweet moment that finds Key writing a letter to his kid (Key’s child was born in 2023). He gently sings “If I could put these times inside a jar/Inside my heart, you’d be there, just smiling/Your big blue eyes align the stars inside my heart/I see my whole life in your big blue eyes”.
The structure of Better Days, opening and closing with the tracks it does, is intentional. Lyrically, the album is talking significantly about the past, about nostalgia, about things that we no longer have or one day will no longer have. “Big Blue Eyes” is an excellent album closer because it’s consciously choosing to live in the moment and talk about the fact that Key knows one day this moment will no longer exist. He’s realizing it before the moment passes him by. On Better Days, Yellowcard is bottling those moments, putting them in a jar, and preserving them for years to come.
