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Mar 29, 2022 By Austin Saalman

When tracing the roots of emo’s third wave, several major releases quickly emerge as integral to the movement. Taking Back Sunday’s seminal debut Tell All Your Friends remains a central influence on this phenomenon, which soon unfolded and ultimately dominated ’00s popular culture. The Long Island rockers successfully synthesized their post-hardcore influences with those of the decade’s fertile pop-punk movement—the massively appealing subgenre for any artist seeking MTV airplay at the time—and, whether knowingly or unknowingly, helped to design the architecture of a major era in music and fashion. In this respect, the album holds cultural significance for any millennial rock historian seeking to explore the faded origins of this singular generational subculture as it experiences a fascinating revival.

Tell All Your Friends is a jagged tale of tangled sheets and wrinkled school clothes, out of which some desperate adolescent ghosts have since slipped, nestling themselves against one another in fits of jealous sleep, trying in vain to breathe ever softly. It is a tale of still houses lining seemingly self-perpetuating suburban blocks, of stale cigarette smoke and crowded parking lots after a Friday night show. Such imagery is aptly captured in Adam Lazzara and John Nolan’s lyrics, which spill across the band’s hook-laden emo rock melodies, voicing in earnest the massive apprehensions of a waifish post-9/11 youth culture of flat ironed bangs, chafing mascara, and weekend mall escapades. The glum seeds sown in dingy mid-’90s basements had since sprouted into a fresh scene of hormonal rage and deep self-loathing masquerading as smirking narcissism, weaned on self-contradictory mainstream sensibilities and frequent pursuits of glamorous gratification.

Opening track “You Know How I Do” introduces the band’s signature sound, with feedback-ridden guitars and emotive call-and-response vocals, Lazzara and Nolan stating, “We won’t stand for hazy eyes anymore.” Rife with dejection, subsequent standout “Bike Scene” finds the band rocking in top form, the track’s lyrics resembling the petulant sort of high school breakup poetry eventually torn from notebooks and tossed into wastebaskets after the bell has rung, Lazzara confessing, “I wanna hate you so bad/But I can’t stop this/Any more than you can.” Also noteworthy here are the backing vocals provided by Nolan’s sister Michelle DaRosa, who also appears on “Ghost Man on Third,” and with whom Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper would go on to form “existential” emo pop outfit Straylight Run following their departure from Taking Back Sunday. The splinter group’s 2004-released eponymous debut is also of merit and entirely worth revisiting on one’s journey through ’00s musical history.

Central number “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team)” represents the best of what came on subsequent efforts Where You Want to Be and Louder Now, boasting some of the album’s most iconic lines, including, “And will you tell all your friends/You’ve got your gun to my head?/This all was only wishful thinking.” An anguished snarl of “I never let you hold me back” sends a rush of blood through youthful veins, the track’s punchy guitars and tangled harmonies mirroring the frenzy of middle class high school restlessness. Perhaps Nolan’s major contribution to the album, “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” takes aim at former best friend and bandmate Jesse Lacey, who was included in Taking Back Sunday’s original lineup before departing to form Brand New. Backroom gossip will inform you of Nolan’s indiscretion: having cheated with Lacey’s then-girlfriend, thus warranting the release of Brand New’s scathing “Seventy Times 7” the previous year. Nolan’s side of the story, as told against his band’s clattering percussion and crunching guitars, seems far more sympathetic, as he professes his compassion for Lacey in such lines as, “Wearing your black eye like a badge of honor/Soaking in sympathy/From friends who never loved you/Nearly half as much as me,” while still passing the blame, declaring, “You never knew/Well I never told you/Everything I know about breaking hearts/I learned from you, it’s true.” This may be the album’s key track, its emotion raw, Nolan’s heartache and frustration culminating in his throat-blistering proclamation: “Best friends means I pulled the trigger/Best friends means you get what you deserve.”

An underrated inclusion, “Great Romances of the 20th Century” remains an exemplary emo anthem, its guitars conjuring the sounds of evening streets as heard from speeding cars, the bold and battered sun casting its final bloody rays across the horizon. Heartache in the tape deck, old friends in the backseat, singing in unison, “I never said I’d take this lying down.” Likewise, “Timberwolves at New Jersey” remains another one of Taking Back Sunday’s finest cuts, guitarists Nolan and Eddie Reyes shining as they thrash the track to shreds, the group revisiting the ups and downs of the region’s hardcore scene, its (likely tongue in cheek) sense of boyish naivety still prominent on lines such as, “Literate and stylish/Kissable and quiet/Well that’s what girls’/Dreams are made of.” The track stands as a prosperous nostalgia factory in and of itself, pumping memories of teenage sentimentality from graffitied smokestacks until the sky beyond is overcast with the faded faces of all the friends you still miss.

“You’re So Last Summer,” a genre classic, finds Taking Back Sunday coming together in its entirety, demonstrating that the group’s strength lies in numbers. Here, Lazzara recounts, “And she said, ‘You’re a touch overrated/You’re a lush and I hate it’/But these grass stains on my knees/They won’t mean a thing” against Nolan and Reyes’ stinging guitars, which pair well with Mark O’Connell’s trembling percussion raging just behind their punky melodies. “Maybe I should hate you for this” brings a wealth of adolescent bitterness, as straightforward as a bus stop insult ought to be, while other more dated lines such as, “The truth is you could slit my throat/And with my one last gasping breath/I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt” are as melodramatic as they are cringe-inducing—but what is adolescence, if not flippant remarks and inarticulate phrasing…the sort of content one finds in bulk on most classic third-wave releases. Elsewhere, “The Blue Channel” and “Head Club”—both admittedly filler, included only so that the band could “get enough songs put on the record so that [it] could go on tour”—serve as lesser entries, but are by no means duds. All in all, Tell All Your Friends rounds itself out well.

While still not quite as tight or polished as 2004’s Where You Want To Be, Tell All Your Friends remains one of the group’s greatest offerings, mashing the rage, sorrow, and envy of youth into the infectious Warped Tour hooks of the group’s respective scene. At 20, the album, despite its sometimes regrettable lyrical content, succeeds at evoking buckets of wistful nostalgia, while still rocking hard and aiming for both throat and heart. Even now, those empty bedrooms call out, their sheets grown stiff, the crush with whom you once hid so silently between them now no longer to be found—what became of them? The album, unfortunately, cannot answer your questions, offering instead to take you back one more time, the music as fresh as it was upon your first listen.

www.takingbacksunday.com

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