Since 2012, Neck Deep has been cultivating a nostalgic sound, drawing influence heavily from the foundations of pop-punk: blink-182, Sum 41, and Green Day. This influence is apparent immediately, with energetic tempos and themes often reflecting the ups and downs of adolescence. A Day To Remember and The Wonder Years are more recent bands than the others mentioned but have also influenced this genre, following the same recipe to create anthems of teenagehood.
They’ve leaned into this sound since their first single, “What Did You Expect?,” was released after being recorded in the attic of lead vocalist Ben Barlow’s home in 2012. This song gained some attention online attracting others to get in touch with the band and eventually join, resulting in the recording of the rest of this album, “Rain in July.”
More popularly, “The Peace and the Panic,” which includes the songs “Wish You Were Here” and “In Bloom,” was released in 2017 and has collectively accumulated hundreds of millions of streams across all of its tracks. This is the band’s third to last album and the most recent that follows the style that Neck Deep outlined for themselves all those years ago. Their second to last album, “All Distortions Are Intentional,” is still obvious to fans that it’s a Neck Deep record, but it’s slower and a little more apathetic lyricism-wise.
Finally, their sixth, self-titled album is, in many ways, essential to Neck Deep. While it is out of the ordinary to wait so long to release a self-titled album, this one calls back to the band’s origins sound-wise and will certainly hold up as timeless, no matter where the genre progresses or even branches off into separate alternative subgenres. They keep up with the apathy but bring back their upbeat guitars and breathe new life into pop-punk in an era where so many bands have lost focus regarding what it means to make meaningful music, which is certainly unrelated to keeping up with the mainstream.
Most tracks, as is typical, focus on love and loss, like “Heartbreak of the Century,” where vocalist Barlow asks, “Are you sure that it can’t be like before?” On the seventh track, “Take Me With You,” Barlow begs aliens to come down and bring him to their planet because Earth “sucks and [they] can have it,” following pop-punk’s themes of leaving one’s hometown. It’s difficult not to connect this track to blink-182’s “Aliens Exist,” off of their 1999 album “Enema of the State,” during which Tom DeLonge declares his belief in extraterrestrials.
Neck Deep hadn’t toured North America since 2021, when they were joined by nothing,nowhere. and Heart Attack Man. This time around, they’re bringing Higher Power, Bearings, and, most notably, DRAIN. They kicked off the tour on January 25th in Nashville, TN, and will be in Boston this Friday, February 16th, to share their new album with East Coast fans.
