Mayday Parade - Sugar
One thing I’ve noticed about the bands in this scene - call it pop-punk, emo, alternative, whatever subgenre you prefer - is that a majority of the bands have all gotten better, particularly the ones with stable lineups. Years of grinding it out on the road in dingy venues and festival stages, followed by months of writing and recording in studios for two decades, gives you your ten thousand hours. No band falls under this category more than Mayday Parade, the Florida-based five-piece that has been going incredibly strong since the release of their 2007 debut A Lesson In Romantics. Looking to challenge themselves even further after the release of their seventh studio album, 2021’s What It Means To Fall Apart, the band has created a three-part album that they’ve been steadily releasing over the course of a year.
Sugar is the conclusion to this trilogy, and it features all the traditional aphorisms about love, loss, and youth that accompany a Mayday Parade album. I believe it to be the best of the three released, opening with the powerful instrumental “Set Phasers To Bummed” before careening headfirst into lead single “Blame It on The Youth”, one of the catchiest songs that the band has put forth in its existence. Songs like “Sweet Sad Sugar” and “Patriotism Of First Tiger Called Into Question” might as well have been included on A Lesson In Romantics with their pop-punk exuberance only further contrasted by emotive lyrics that Derek Sanders has been known to bring forth over these last two decades.
“Weekend Music” blends the emo nature of Dashboard Confessional with the energy of a Sugarcult track, while songs like “Lying To Myself” and “Two Hearts” find Sanders hitting a breaking point in a relationship, struggling to stay sane while he laments that two people have indeed grown apart. It’s really a shame that Sanders gives some of his best vocal performances when he’s lamenting the end of a relationship. I don’t want him to be miserable, but he’s damn good at singing about it.
“What Happens Next” acts as both the conclusion to the trilogy and a bookend to the previous entry, Sad. The penultimate track on Sad, “Breakup Song”, is an almost-too-upbeat track about a couple going their separate ways, feeling more at home on modern pop radio than anything on the Vans Warped Tour. I imagine that “What Happens Next” examines the results of that decision, with Sanders singing over piano chords about the foreseeable future, before the song explodes into an epic full band finale. It’s that breaking point that couples who break up reach where they stare out into the distance, thinking, “What now?” Material like this is encoded into Mayday Parade’s DNA.
It was at this point in writing my review that I looked up something about Derek Sanders, and I found out that he is happily married. It’s quite impressive that, all these years later, this band can pull from their earlier heartbreaks and create the kind of music that defines a generation of dreamers.
