New Found Glory: "We didn’t mean for it to happen..."

New Found Glory have always known how to have fun. If you ever find yourself feeling down, the opening riff to mega-hit ‘My Friends Over You’ is the perfect pick-me-up. It’s something the band have always been good at; they’re pop punk at its very core. This year marks the band’s twentieth anniversary, and it sees them celebrating with new material and landmark live shows in support of A Day To Remember. Ahead of the band’s first ever foray into Wembley Arena, drummer Cyrus Bolooki doesn’t seem particularly fazed by playing such a fabled stage. However, the importance certainly isn’t lost on him. “Back in 2004-5 we supported Green Day [on their ‘American Idiot’ tour], so we did play a few of these places, but it’s an iconic one here. You check it off the list.” While the rest of the band are trying to stay warm in an increasingly cold dressing room, Cyrus considers their impressive feat of lasting an incredible twenty years. “It’s pretty amazing to get to this point; it’s not something that we thought about when we first started our band, and it’s very important for us to be able to point it out and celebrate with everybody. The fact that we are still here - that is a huge thing, but we are still an active band, and we have a new record coming out.” Heading into the studio to record their ninth full-length, the band were still as in-tune as ever, relishing those hard to predict moments when their songs suddenly clicked into place. “There are different ways to look at it,” Cyrus muses. “We all definitely still enjoy what we do, and with all of our new material, I think we find that it happens at different parts of the process. Sometimes it’s early on when writing, sometimes it’s after you finish the record, but there are always these moments where the songs hit you, and they just take on a meaning with you. “Just like, it’s defined, and we’re still having that happen with these records. I think we’re very proud of our newest record, but it’s going to be very fun being in the twentieth year playing those old records all the way through. We’re going to be playing songs we’ve never played before live, and putting ourselves back in those situations from when we recorded them.” The band have a legion of fans who’ve followed them since the (relatively) early days of ‘New Found Glory’ and ‘Sticks & Stones’, which feature some of pop punk’s most treasured hits. However, such is their omnipresence they also have a knack for picking up new listeners without even trying. “There might also be some people who quite honestly could’ve been seven or eight years old when these records came out,” laughs Cyrus, “but that’s a great thing for us.” The challenge of digging through their back catalogue - “literally putting on an iPod and listening to it again” - is one he’s looking forward to. “It’s going to be very interesting and fun for us to figure them out quite honestly, and also how to make them translate live. Even if people don’t really know the songs, it’ll be more fun for us to finally get them out there because they deserve to be heard like that.” Twenty years as a band has resulted in a hefty repertoire - helpfully Cyrus has already done the maths. “This is our ninth record coming out which means that there’s one-hundred-and-sixty plus New Found Glory songs. You can’t play one-hundred-and-sixty songs live. We physically cannot do that!” It’s a fair point, and it’s resulted in the rediscovery of a few tracks that’s garnered the reaction, “I don’t even remember doing this?!” “I’m looking forward to playing ‘Catalyst’,” he continues. “I’ve always loved that record, but it also means playing some of the songs that we’ve never played live. ‘Coming Home’ has that same thing going on, it’s songs that when we wrote them, we loved the way they were, and we put them on a record, obviously, but we never really took the time to try and even play them live. It wasn’t even a thought, and now it’s like, we’re doing it, we set that goal!” “We didn’t mean for it to happen,” starts guitarist Chad Gilbert, of their twentieth anniversary coinciding with their new album, ‘Makes Me Sick’, “and that’s why we went with it. It was a natural thing; we usually wait three years between records, and it just so happened it was time we released a new one. As we were talking about it and started writing and looking at touring we were like, ‘Wait a second, next year’s our 20 years… that can’t go unnoticed!’” They’re confident that between the band’s new material, and their anniversary shows later in the year, there’s something coming up for everyone. “Our new album, that we’re really proud, of can’t go unnoticed, but I almost feel like it’s a perfect storm. There are elements in our new record that are gonna make all those twenty-year people who haven’t seen us in a long time be psyched and realise that, ‘Damn, this new album is just as good, if not better, as this old stuff!’” Chad continues: “It’s the perfect platform because sometimes you see a band you love and they play all these new songs, and you’re like, ‘Dammit, that’s cool, I respect the band - but I want the old stuff’. It’s pretty much the perfect tour for our fans; they get to hear one new song and two albums of old stuff.” “And like you said,” adds Cyrus, “not just the fact we’re going to do the twenty-year tour because we’re a twenty-year band, we’re still putting out new music.” They’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. “If you look at this anniversary tour, it’s six albums,” Chad beams. “When a lot of bands do anniversary tours, they’ll play the one album, but it’s six albums that our fans love. The fact we have six albums to celebrate on this tour - because we wanted it to be ones before 2010 - our fans know we’re not only about nostalgia.” New Found Glory’s passion for being an active band, not just trading on ‘the hits’, jumps out. “That every album we’re not selling them short, every album we push ourselves because that’s what our fans deserve... They don’t deserve for us to just fart out a record that sounds like the last one, you know what I mean? Fo’ sho’!” Even after multiple decades, they remain key players in the pop punk game. “If you put out a lot of records,” explains Cyrus, “there might be people out there who think, ‘Well for this record they really changed their sound’, but when we play all these songs live they all mesh together. It’s going to be fun when you have a record like ‘Coming Home’, and you’re playing it with songs from ‘Not Without A Fight’. They will come together even if one record is generally a little slower and one might be a little punkier. It’s cool because that’s how you can tell the type of band that we are. There’s a constant throughout. When you get all of us on stage together, everything sounds like New Found Glory, whether it’s slow or fast, heavy or not, all that stuff.” With all of this going on and the future looking to be just as strong, the band prepare for their “Hello, Wembley” moment - but not before Chad admits with a chuckle that New Fond Glory are, quite simply, “the best”. New Found Glory’s album ‘Makes Me Sick’ is out now.