Great art should speak for itself. There’s a good reason for this. Listening to an artist describe their work can be absolutely excruciating. Either you’re subjected to a sales pitch, or they describe something that bears no resemblance to the finished project or, worse still, they fail to grasp that subject and execution are not mutually exclusive. Story Of The Year go to great lengths to tell you how clever the title of their new album ‘A.R.S.O.N.’ or ‘All Rage Still Only Numb’ is. Except, the only way you’d put those words in that order is if you were trying to make the acronym in the first place. Thankfully, the music is more than capable of making a statement.
There is a lot to like about Story Of The Year’s seventh album. It is, as you might expect, made up of big, fun rock songs with an air of pop punk and a whiff of hardcore. If you’ve enjoyed their previous work, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy the ten songs collected here. ‘A.R.S.O.N.’ is Story Of The Year, but not by numbers. It has different ambitions. It’s neither remarkably inventive, nor particularly different, but it is saying new things. It’s a bold statement. A strong one. There are ideas, flashes of inspiration and, most importantly, great songs. They’ve been doing this since 1995 yet they’ve managed to uncover a degree of freshness. Indeed, while 2023’s ‘Tear Me To Pieces’ was desperately saying: ‘Remember how good we were?’, here they’re saying: ‘Surprise! We’re Still Relevant’, which is a much stronger statement.
Despite the tepid results on their last album, the band has again elected to work with producer Colin Brittain. Trust is important. Clearly they work well together and you’d be forgiven for thinking it would retrace the same steps. But ‘Gasoline (All Rage Still Only Numb)’ almost immediately takes a match to that idea. The result is not really a reinvention but makes different, better choices, capturing a chunky sound that retains enough personality to feel both invigorated and novel. The trick is threading a needle between two sounds, a live band and a studio-based project. It resultantly feels like four guys jamming in a room even when it dips its toes into electronic trickery.
Given the record’s title, you can’t help but think of fire; a rapid, persistent change of state – a transfer of energy. It’s a good way to think about the record as that fieriness defines it. This is partly due to the band’s pop-punk roots but there is also a bounce to the riffs and song structures that feel electric. Indeed, the mix of style and substance has a lot in common with bands like Hot Milk or Fever 333; remarkable when you remember that this band is old enough to have grandkids. You can feel this energy being built around big, string-bendy riffs like on ‘3am’, but more broadly you can hear it in the way different elements interact. The work from drummer Josh Wills is particularly noteworthy and the way he chases grooves around his kit is delightful. You can hear this on ‘Disconnected’ and ‘Fall Away’, both of which have an electronic element but which flow in coherent (if slightly unusual) ways; a clear indication that youthful energy isn’t about copying twenty-year old work.
Unsurprisingly, the record has a lot to say about sequencing. The songs all have a straightforward shape with little fat. It is carefully organised so it hums along, spreading the ‘classic’ style between the more unusual songs here, allowing so much energy to crackle through that you’d think it was strung between two pylons.
Any statement the record makes is of course filtered through vocalist Dan Marsala and by approaching each song with a different emphasis, he reinforces its inventiveness. ‘Halos’ feels like a classic Story of The Year song, with a proper verse, chorus and breakdown and yelling. Meanwhile, ‘3am’ has more of a pop-punk feel and ‘My Religion’ feels like he’s trying to squeeze too many words into one space, only adding to the song’s feisty spark. This continues on ‘Fall Away’, which drops a few rapped bars amongst some of the album’s heaviest riffs, giving it a really unusual flow. It’s a great use of the hackneyed ‘let’s add a rapped verse’ trope while expanding the album’s range.
Slightly silly backronyms aside, Marsala’s lyrics are oblique enough to have a sense of about, without losing the accessibility you’d expect from this type of rock music. He makes a lot of strong, effective choices and gives each song a sense of identity. Notably, there’s a huge chorus to ‘Into The Dark’ which leans into the Woah Woah energy to create the album’s biggest song, and one you’d expect to see as a breakout single. The similarly triumphant closer, the epic and emo ‘I Don’t Wanna Feel Like This Anymore’, is an absolute delight – the kind of song that should become a live staple. Even the slightly forgettable acoustic number ‘Better Than High’ offers a rock-solid piece of songwriting, keeping the overall quality high.
Although ‘Good For Me/Feel So Bad’ harks back to yesteryear, it still manages to bathe in the past’s warm glow while avoiding sounding old and tired, which a surprising feat. It’s overall a step forward, and a strong one too. The past is gone; there is only now. Story Of The Year are comfortable with that. ‘A.R.S.O.N.’ speaks for itself. It’s refreshed, energetic and the strongest record they have made in at least a decade.
IAN KENWORTHY