New Found Glory

It’s been decades since NEW FOUND GLORY’s likeness was chiseled onto pop-punk’s Mount Rushmore, but as the Coral Springs, Florida, quartet approach their landmark 30th anniversary, they still have a lot to say.

LISTEN UP!, their 11th studio album and first for Pure Noise Records, stands as a testament to resilience, shaped by guitarist Chad Gilbert’s ongoing battle with an aggressive metastatic cancer. It’s the same full-hearted sentiment that colored their 2023 acoustic EP, Make The Most Of It, here delivered in three-minute bursts of the band’s trademark pop-punk sound: the shiny melodies that launched them onto TRL in the early 2000s, the ghosts of the tight-knit punk and hardcore scenes they came up in as teenagers.

It’s the style that’s made NFG a multigenerational affair, as era-defining tracks from gold and platinum albums like 2000’s New Found Glory, 2002’s Sticks And Stones, and 2004’s Catalyst get the same fervent live response as the fan-favorite collection of covers like “Kiss Me” and “Let It Go.” The band has come a long way from their humble South Florida beginnings, as detailed on the Listen Up! standout “Beer And Blood Stains,” a nostalgic riff-factory detailing the band’s early battle scars at local clubs, where danger meant more than catching a stray elbow in the swirl of a circle pit. “Looking back, was it fun or crime?” Pundik muses on the track before elevating the album’s simple-yet-profound mission statement: “It’s good to be alive.”