The Starting Line - Eternal Youth
The Starting Line
Eternal Youth
Release Date: September 26th, 2025
Label: Lineage Recordings
The Starting Line is an anomaly of a band. Since coming onto the scene in the late 90s, they have only released a total of four albums (including the one we’re talking about here), all of them excellent. There was a gap of eighteen years between the release of their last album, Direction, and this album, Eternal Youth. They have retained their entire original lineup since 1999, only adding keyboardist Brian Schmutz in 2005. Other than appearances at major festivals around the country, the band hasn’t done a proper headlining tour in nearly seventeen years. How is it possible for a band to have this much staying power and still sound so good after being out of the studio and off the road for so many years?
Eternal Youth is a brisk half-hour listen, and probably the least “pop-punk” record you’d come to expect from The Starting Line. Every track in its thirty-five-minute runtime feels like it was written in the late 90s, on the cusp of early emo and pop-punk, around the time that acts like The Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World were beginning to emerge, yet the production makes it feel entirely modern. Kenny Vasoli’s vocals have more grit to them these days, still retaining their melodic charm as he sings his way through song after song (this album is filled with identifiable hooks in each track). The lyrics are poetic in nature and purposefully vague, a contrast against the directness of the fuzzy guitars and sharp melodies.
When you look at the last few releases from The Starting Line, more than half of them have been on major labels. Eternal Youth is the sound of a band that is no longer constrained by commercial expectations. It is the sound of a band that has evolved into a new direction while retaining its familiarity with the sound that made them a staple of this scene’s music and the Drive-Thru Records era. It is a unique collection of music from The Starting Line, and not the album I expected. Regardless, I like it.
