The Menzingers: After The Party [Album Review]

The Menzingers new album After the Party hit the shelves on the 3rd of February. The bands fifth studio album starts with the track Telling Lies: “Where’re we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” is the stand out lyric. It goes perfectly with the fast beat, growly vocals and rock guitar.

Thick as Thieves next up, kind of has a classic rock feel to it, and a very catchy hook. It’s a song you wouldn’t mind dancing to or cracking out at a karaoke, apart from that it’s a bit of a filler song. Lookers is a sweet song, “You were such a looker in the old days.” You get the reminiscing feeling with this song and it’s great, it’s a real feel good tune.

Midwestern States is catchy as hell, definitely a stand out track. It’s so relatable, falling asleep to something dumb on Netflix and wanting to drive away until you hit the shore. Everyone at some point in their life has done or felt that before. A constant theme throughout this album is that of leaving your twenties behind, maybe not wanting the party to end but also being ready for it to end.

The song Blue Boy changes it up a bit from the rock guitar and has nice melodies over a chugging bass and steady drums, while the chorus goes full pelt into pop punk goodness.

The title track After the Party is second to last on this album, starts off really sweet with a soft guitar riff before breaking into the heavy guitar that’s a welcome contrast and just right for this song. This is a really good classic song.

The last track on the album Livin’ Ain’t Easy is a fairly slow song compared to the rest of the album. It’s a nice song, thought provoking lyrics “Only a fool would think living could be easy” it’s easy to listen to but if you’re in quite a good mood I’d maybe skip this song for another time.

This album is a little bit punk rock, a little bit indie pop, and very, very cool. The name of the album and some of the lyrics on the album suggest that After the Party is about leaving your twenties behind, your twenties being the party and where to go from there. Wherever/whatever it is, it sounds damn good.