In honor of the 10th anniversaries of The Upsides and Suburbia, I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing, The Wonder Years have revisited the fast-paced pop punk style of those albums (and teamed back up with producer Steve Evetts) for the new song "Brakeless." The Wonder Years don't really make this kind of music anymore, but as "Brakeless" proves, they're still masters of it. The band says:

“Brakeless” is one of two new songs we recorded over the summer. We were thinking about ways to celebrate the ten year anniversaries of The Upsides and Suburbia. The two records were released a year apart and, maybe, from the outside, they feel like different eras of the band but internally, it was one long, sleep-deprived blur of rest stop bathrooms, walmart parking lots, airport floors and dirty green rooms. To us, the two records are forever intertwined and needed to be celebrated together. In a deep-dive through an old hard drive, I (Dan) stumbled onto a voice-note demo dated during the writing of Suburbia.

It was a song I never showed the band because I didn’t feel like it had a place on the record and the idea struck me to try to go back in time and turn it into a full song. And then we thought, “If we’re going to do a new song in the style of Suburbia, then we should do one in the style of Upsides as well.” So we did. We went back and dug through old-unused ideas from the era. We reread journals and sifted through memories and we wrote two new songs that we feel would be at home on those records and we got the team back together to do it.

Steve Evetts who produced and mixed Suburbia produced these songs and Vince Ratti who produced and mixed Upsides mixed them. Because of the pandemic, Steve produced remotely from California via technology that is way above my pay-grade, and so our live engineer, Andy Clarke, engineered for us in person at Retro City Studios in Philadelphia. Now, like we said, this song wasn’t going to come out for another two months.

We challenged y’all to register to vote, check your status and request your mail-in ballot and you showed up in numbers to do that; so we’re keeping our end of the bargain and putting it out now. All that really means is that you should keep your eyes peeled, because there’s more to come and we’re really excited to show you all of what we’ve been working on.

For now, enjoy "Brakeless"! Thanks everyone.

The Wonder Years will also be getting back to pop punk with their blink-182 Halloween covers set livestream on October 30 at 8 PM ET (tickets). TWY frontman Dan Campbell also just appeared as a guest on Mark Hoppus' After School Radio show on Apple Music.

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