In 2003, Florida pop-punk band Yellowcard burst onto the KROQ-meets-TRL mainstream with their major-label debut album and its teenage-dreaming breakout single, “Ocean Avenue.” But surprisingly, it took another 22 years for them to score their first-ever No. 1 at alternative rock radio. “Better Days,” the title track from their new comeback album, not only achieved this feat and held the chart’s top spot for three weeks, but it also set a record for the longest gap between an artist’s first appearance on that chart and a No. 1 entry.
“We are completely blown away by basically everything that is happening in our lives right now,” marvels Yellowcard frontman Ryan Key during an LPTV interview at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where he, guitarist Josh Portman, founding violinist/mandolinist Sean Mackin are signing copies of Better Days for a long queue of longtime Yellowcard devotees. “I’ve never seen people react to music from Yellowcard like they are right now. … We didn’t know we were going to make this album, but [the reaction] has really made this record an extremely special event for us personally. And I think that is naturally going to translate to fans.”
Better Days is aptly titled, because between the new record and 2016’s Yellowcard, there were some very dark periods when the band members didn’t record, tour, or even speak with each other. Mackin and Key were in fact estranged for six years. “It was a really rough time. It was rough. It was awful. It was terrible,” admits Key.
“I also didn’t pick up the violin for six years,” Mackin reveals somberly. “I played mandolin and ukulele, I still had an outlet, but every time, [playing violin] reminded me of [Yellowcard]. And there’s heartbreak in there. Whatever the way the story was told and how it ended, there was joy in it, but also was very sad for each of us.”
“When we ended up deciding to step away from this, we thought we were stepping away forever, because we were just fucking exhausted. We were just done. It never stopped. We never came home,” explains Key, recalling how during Yellowcard’s whirlwind years after the success of Ocean Avenue, they were “grinding it out so hard to keep music as a job, to be able to pay our bills, touring like 10 months a year. … And then we would finish the tour and it was just right back into the studio. No breaks.” This grueling schedule eventually took its toll, and according to Key, the band’s “records started to sort of become a little more transactional.” The joy was gone.
“When we said, ‘It’s over,’ collectively, was probably the lowest point then in our career and possibly our lives,” Key confesses. “It’s like you’re saying goodbye to the only thing you’ve really ever known. I mean, for me, getting out of the band was like, ‘Well, who am I? What do I even do? Who am I without Yellowcard?’ And so, getting from there to here, for all of us, has been both individually and collectively a lot about healing. We had a lot of really cool, adult conversations when we started talking about getting this going again, and we just talked about the concept that we have to be more kind to each other and to ourselves. We have to allow the space for ourselves to express how we feel and not make it such an individual effort, as it had been for so many years. So, I think this record at its core is about healing and growing.”
The healing process began in 2022, when the band reunited — at the urging of supportive manager Kristen Worden-Harris (“She’s just been there for us,” says Mackin) — for Chicago’s Riot Fest to play Ocean Avenue in its entirety. It was at their Riot Fest rehearsals that Key and Mackin saw each other in person for the first time since Yellowcard went on indefinite hiatus, and it was soon evident that the old magic was still there.
“Sean and I communicated a little bit via email [before Riot Fest], just kind of opening up to say, ‘Hey dude, let’s figure this out so we can move forward.’ And then when we all got in the rehearsal space in Chicago, it was pretty rad,” Key recalls fondly. “We had three days of rehearsal booked, and on the first day we played the record two times and we were kind of like, ‘Are you good? I think I’m good!’ … It came together and became clear that there was a lot left in this story, pretty quickly.”
“I think part of that fear of, ‘How do we do this?’ was just kind of all answered organically,” Mackin adds, grinning. “It was that moment of kind looking at each other and thinking, this is a great opportunity. Do we hug it out and say, ‘Hey, Ocean Avenue, 20 years!’ and then, ‘See you guys later,’ or are we going to do something really special? And obviously the answer was, ‘We want to do it special, but how do we do it? How do we get there?’ And then Ryan had a brilliant idea. He said: ‘Let’s write the best Yellowcard record we ever wrote.’”
That was obviously a daunting challenge after such a long and emotionally fraught break, but returned to the studio feeling refreshed. They spent more than a year making Better Days — a luxury of time that they hadn’t enjoyed since Ocean Avenue — and they also brought their near-decade years of life experience into the session, as husbands and fathers now in their mid-forties.
“The trick is, how do you do this when you’re 45 and not just sound like you’re desperately trying to be 25? It is a super-fine line to walk, and I think the record achieves that. The music to me feels very authentically Yellowcard… but lyrically, I’m writing about fatherhood and falling in love again for real,” says Key, who married his second wife, Laura Gillway, in 2022. “I wrote about my son [who was born in December 2023] and becoming a father for the first time. I wrote about some tough things I went through before I met my wife. … I feel like the lyrics are really honest and intelligible. … It seems like they’re hitting people in the right way.”
Key and company also had help from some important collaborators, including producer Travis Barker (who, surprisingly, the band did not already know well, and were extremely nervous to work with at first); Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba (on “Love Letters Lost”); and another pop-punk icon, Avril Lavigne, who was enlisted by Barker to duet on the “classic 2002” ballad “You Broke Me Too.” They also worked with outside songwriters for the first time in Yellowcard’s career, like Goldfinger’s John Feldmann, Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young, Nick Long (Machine Gun Kelly, BØRNS, King Princess), and Andrew Goldstein (Maroon 5, Katy Perry, Linkin Park, Demi Lovato, 5 Seconds of Summer, Yungblud, All Time Low).
In the past, while residing in Nashville for a while, Key had had some negative experiences sitting in on professional songwriting sessions, but for Better Days, he “just had this feeling it was time to do some co-writes. … I brought up the idea like, ‘Full disclosure, I think I might need a little help to get the ball rolling and get the creative juices flowing,’ to see if I could still write pop punk songs.” Key, a self-deprecatingly self-described “just an EDM kid now,” had mostly focused on making electronic music during his break from Yellowcard (including JEDHA, a side-project with Yellowcard guitarist Ryan Mendez), and he jokes, “Rock ‘n’ roll has left my body for some reason. It is what it is!”
But Keys says revisiting rock on Better Days “was really a breakthrough thing for me. Now that it’s out, hearing how happy it’s making people… I can’t remember the last time that we had an album where my brain is firing to go write more songs! That’s just a really cool feeling, especially when I don’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll and pop-punk anymore. It’s like, I just want to write some pop-punk. Let’s go!”
And so, it won’t be another nine years before fans hear new music from Yellowcard. EDM enthusiast Key teases that “there may or may not be a remix” of a Better Days track that’s “going to be mind-blowing,” but there will of course, also be a new album.
“Having my life changed in these amazing ways, and then having the maturity to look at our story and talk about it openly through the lyrics in terms of that healing process and being honest about how unhealthy the whole thing was at the end… our relationships were not good. We were not friendly. We were in a really bad place. And now we’re, quite frankly, in the most amazing place we’ve ever been as a band — in any version, any lineup,” Key declares excitedly. “I know a wild part of this story is the members have changed, and it’s been really hard on the fans and we’ve always felt awful about that. But this lineup and this moment we’re having is, without question, maybe the only iteration of the band and time in the band where every single thing about it is just positive energy. … I hope going forward that that’s the case — that we have a little bit more breathing room to focus on getting [fans] the best songs we can write for you, and also just on our own mental health and being able to enjoy this a little bit more.
“This feels like 20 years of progress,” Key proudly sums up, sharing warm glances with this bandmates. “This is what we were looking for. This is what we hoped for, so much.”
Yellowcard will play KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas alongside Social Distortion, Rise Against, Evanescence, Papa Roach, the All-American Rejects, Wet Leg, the Paradox, and recent comeback tourmates Third Eye Blind, on Dec. 13 at the fabulous Forum in at Los Angeles.
