It’s a scorching summer’s day in the park, and in a couple of hours The Menzingers are going to set Slam Dunk's Monster Stage on fire with their set. Right now though, Greg Barnett is making the most of his time in the shade in Hatfield. “We just got here, and yeah, it's been a blast. We're already bumping into a million friends and it's been awesome. I love being at Slam Dunk. I feel like the festival sets, they're so short so you have to pack everything in; it's high intensity. We call it ‘going for the jugular’: all the most popular songs, and some surprises too. We're just trying to have a fun, high energy set.”

As if seeing his mates wasn’t enough to put the vocalist in a good mood, their next album, ‘Everything I Ever Saw’, is out in July. “It’s a record that’s really, really important to us,” he explains. “This is our eighth record and sometimes you just get extra lucky with them. You love them all, but then sometimes you think ‘wow, how did that come out like that?’ This record feels like that; a lightning-in-a-bottle type record.”

We got our first hints at the contents of ‘Everything I Ever Saw’ back in April with the release of their latest single, ‘Chance Encounters’, and Barnett sees it as a reflection of the new album’s direction. “I feel like it sums up a little bit of the record lyrically. I love that song because it was a brain dump of words that you mix together and then you find the meaning of the song. It’s like if time doesn’t matter and you can look at your life, go back from when you’re fifteen to who you are now and go back and forth between different lyrical lines, like a chance encounter. It’s almost like the story of my life with music and the people that I’ve met through the lyrics and through that experience. I hear it and I’m like sixteen again, but then I’m who I am now. It’s all tied up in these chance encounters that we have with people that you meet at festivals or in line for a show or whatever it could be.”

“Tom [May, guitarist and vocalist for The Menzingers] wrote an instrumental piece for that and he sent it over,” he continues. “We took that and then wrote the song to both the instrumental and the lyrics I already had and made something unique out of it. A lot of times, our songs come from just an acoustic guitar and a vocal that we bring to the band, and that becomes a whole thing. So, I feel like lyrics are a defining thing for the band. If we have a good chorus, then we have something to build upon.”

The Menzingers might be one of the few contemporary punk bands who’ve never changed their lineup, which makes them special on this fact alone. Barnett credits the close bonds between the members with this success. “We’re pretty much a family band, you know? We all live a couple blocks from each other. We just love it. What else would we be doing? This is the best thing ever to do. I think there’s something about everybody having mutual identity in the band. A shared respect for each other when it comes to creating. We all love this. It’s our passion project, we just have a good time together.”

“I think the big lesson I’ve learned from this record,” he adds, “is that I need to remind myself over and over again to be present in the moment. There’s so much about being in a band, and you’re always looking towards the next thing. You’re looking to the next tour, the next album cycle, the next this, the next that, and I feel like I don’t get to enjoy things because I’m always just in a rush to get to the next place. So, the big thing that I’ve tried to learn is to just enjoy the moment, enjoy being at Slam Dunk with all my friends and not be like, what’s the next festival? What’s the next tour? What’s the next song that I’m writing?”

We last saw The Menzingers in the UK back in December 2025, with their anniversary re-release of ‘Rented World’, a record Barnett always associated with London. “We did an anniversary for ‘On The Impossible Past’, the ten-year anniversary. It was really fun, but we did a lot of shows on it. I felt like by the twentieth show, we were kind of like… eh. We were wearing out the welcome of like doing the anniversary thing. So, when [the anniversary of] ‘Rented World’ came around, we were like, you know what? Let’s just do it. We’ll do a Philly show and we’re going to do a London show. Two places that we give a really strong identity to the album. We just wanted to do two smaller club shows. We love The Underworld. It’s been a spot for us for so long. We’re thought, ‘let’s just go over and do two shows and just have a blast.’ I think the first technical record release show of ‘Rented World’ was in London at The Old Blue Last. It just has this tie to London and it felt right.”

“I think ‘Rented World’ had the difficult job of living up to ‘On the Impossible Past’,” he divulges, “which was a really big fan-favourite record. At first I think it had a lot of die-hard fans, but then a lot of fans were like, oh, that’s not ‘On the Impossible Past’. But with ten years in between, people really learned to like love the record in a way that they didn’t before. We wanted to do it justice. People tell us all the time that it’s their favourite record, so we wanted to celebrate it, especially for the people that we call ‘Rented World heads’. They ride or die for that album, so it was in honour of that.”

In the twelve years now between ‘Rented World’s release and the upcoming release of ‘Everything I Ever Saw’, Barnett is now able to reflect on how The Menzingers’ sound has evolved. “When I think of ‘Rented World’, I think of the heavier things that we were all listening to. Manchester Orchestra was a big thing for us in that era. We wanted drop tuned guitars, heavy distorted things, a really big raw live sound. We still love all of that so much, and it’s still a part of our sound. If we’ve changed at all, I think we just really value finding the core identity of the song, letting that speak and then building music around that. We’re really into just finding the most simplest version of the song, seeing what it is and then trying to figure out if it can do anything.”

With that, Greg steps out of the shade and heads to the next step in his Slam Dunk day, leaving us to eagerly speculate what our favourite band and ‘Everything I Ever Saw’ might have in store for us this July.

KATE ALLVEY

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‘Everything I Ever Saw’ is out on 17th July on Epitaph Records