The Menzingers - Some Of It Was True

At what point do you stop looking back through rose-tinted lenses and start wondering if your life ever panned out how you intended? For The Menzingers, the answer is album number seven, where, instead of grasping for the last vestiges of youth, the Pennsylvanian quartet grapple with the universal mid-life crisis of confidence.

It means questions like ‘Have I met my potential?’, ‘What am I doing here?’, ‘Is this what I wanted to do with my life?’ and more all come in for scrutiny. In many ways, these are similar questions to those found on the group’s astonishing ‘After The Party’ – the de facto soundtrack to punk rockers hurtling towards 30 – only here, they’re being asked once youth is a distant memory and you begin to get preoccupied with the with the idea of whether you’ve left a mark on the world (or not).

Given their penchant for storytelling, The Menzingers are masters of this form of questioning. They love nothing better to wrap an existential crisis in the middle of a delightful pop-punk song, and ‘Some Of It Was True’ has 13-such sour-sherbet-filled treats to entice.

And while The Menzingers dip into the tried and trusted on the likes of ‘Love At The End’, the excellent power-pop of ‘Try’ or ‘After The Party’ throwback ‘Alone in Dublin’, the scope of much of ‘Some Of It Was True’ is far beyond anything they’ve done in the past. In particular, ‘Take It To Heart’ is a gloriously heady stomp, built around a groovy guitar line and a monstrous chorus, while the alt-country-tinged ‘High Low’ is the furthest the blue-collar rockers have ever ventured down that path, despite previous flirtations. Both are uniformly excellent.

Then there’s the run of four songs from opener ‘Hope is A Dangerous Little Thing’ through to the title track. All are unmistakably The Menzingers – those denim jackets are so worn in, it couldn’t be anybody else – yet they all twist the formula on its head in some way. In particular, they’ve never brooded quite as much as they do on lead single ‘There’s No Place In This World For Me’.

Ultimately, just as they did on ‘After The Party’, The Menzingers have redefined what the band means as they transition into elder statesmen of the modern punk rock scene. It would be inauthentic to continue to sing songs about cigarette breaks and waitress, but in growing up, they’ve started to ask more prescient questions. There are no easy answers on ‘Some Of It Was True,’ but in finding such deep levels of ambiguity they’ve once again delivered an album for the ages.