Chicago’s Action/Adventure have released a handful of EPs and singles since forming in 2014, and they make unabashedly catchy, glossy pop punk with a hardcore/emo edge. It’s some of the most refreshing stuff this genre has seen since The Greatest Generation-era Wonder Years, and if you like that band (or classic Drive-Thru), I highly recommend checking out Action/Adventure too. They’ve just signed to Pure Noise, who will release their new EP Pulling Focus on April 30. It features recent singles “Barricades” and “Tuck Everlasting,” as well as the just-released “Poser” and four other new songs.

The band have built up a reputation not just for writing extremely tight, catchy songs, but also for using their platform to talk about diversity in the punk scene. The video for “Barricades” — which begins with the lyric “Would you listen if we looked any different?” — features band members holding up signs of racist comments they’ve received as people of color playing in a punk band, like “you don’t look the way you sound,” “you’re not Black enough,” “let me guess… rappers???,” “I’m surprised you guys were that good,” and “you sound sooo white.” They took it a step further by continuing the theme of that video with the Pop Punk In Color mini documentary series, and they also gained traction for starting the #PopPunkInColor hashtag on TikTok. “We hope our stories are able to open up important discussions regarding inclusiveness and diversity in the scene and we hope everyone got something out of our short vignettes,” they said of the docu-series.

The new video for “Poser” plays on the “let me guess… rappers???” theme, and features the band utilizing stereotypes from rap videos. “The ‘Rap Parody’ video has always been something we’ve wanted to do as a band,” they told FLOOD. “The discussions came about from the numerous times we’ve been mistaken for rappers while on tour. We’ve always poked fun at it by saying things like, ‘Maybe if we were rappers people would take us more seriously.'”

Speaking about their TikTok hashtag in the FLOOD interview, they added:

We really want to show people that there are others out there who look like you and have had similar life experiences to you wherever you go. We want to show that music is and should always be inclusive; just because you look a certain way or come from a certain place doesn’t mean that you don’t belong. Having grown up in the pop punk and alternative music scene, the feeling of being out of place or not 100 percent fitting in was something we all dealt with on a regular basis. Every time we’d go to a show or watch a music video there weren’t really many other people who looked like us. With #PopPunkInColor, we just want to help everyone—no matter who they are or where they come from—know that this is a place for them too.

Watch the videos for all three Pulling Focus singles, along with the Pop Pop In Color documentary, and check out the EP artwork and tracklist below…

Tracklist
1. Barricades
2. Poser
3. Club 27
4. Semi-Prologue
5. Tuck Everlasting
6. Nothing Left
7. Pulling Focus