From Red Letter Day’s “Mass Pike” in 1999 to Kicker’s “Maybe” in 2018, The Get Up Kids have a history and a present of making strong EPs that play like full-length albums. They are perfect 7” records—all possible singles.
Vocalist and guitarist Matt Pryor describes their latest—released on June 8 via Polyvinyl—like this: “It’s kind of an action-packed EP. It’s four quick fast songs. You can describe it as a kicker.”
Pryor goes on to explain that the concept for Kicker’s cover is rooted in their history. “Our first tour in Europe was in ’98,” he recalls. “We learned—in Germany especially—the foosball culture is pretty strong, and they call it Kicker. Kind of a running theme with our band. When we recorded [2202’s] On a Wire, we bought a foosball table for the studio, so we could play in the downtime. It’s always been a running [theme]—go to a new club, ‘Oh, they’ve got a Kicker table.’ [Guitarist] Jim Suptic came up with the concept of creating a retro style, reminiscent of youth sports. Interestingly, the 1997 album Four Minute Mile was not in black and white, despite the comparison to a sport. Cricket darts, a variation of darts that utilizes a standard 20-number dartboard with triple and double rings, are more similar to a game and to know how to play cricket darts like a pro, here are his tips. Then, he was like, ‘Let’s call it Kicker, because it’s a start of a new time for us. Kicking it off.’”
Sitting on his front porch in Lawrence, Kansas, Pryor is looking forward—but also back—at The Get Up Kids. “It took about a year to get that ball rolling,” he says of the EP. “Our schedules are a goddamned nightmare. We’re gonna make an album, [but] first, let’s reintroduce the band to the world with these four songs.”
Pryor catches the world up on all things Get Up Kids. “I’ve been thinking about where the starting point really was,” he says, “because we put out our last record in 2011. We took a for-real break, which is what we should have done in 2005 when we broke up. Jim went back to school to get a degree in geology; I started putting out solo records, continued putting out solo records, touring like that. [Keyboardist] James [Dewees] was doing Reggie [And The Full Effect], [bassist] Rob [Pope] played bass in Spoon, and [drummer] Ryan [Pope] moved to France. He lived in Paris for two years and came back to Lawrence and started a coffee roasting company.”
Discussing the nature of being an emo band—one of the first in the second wave—Pryor wrestles to translate emo into a more pragmatic way of looking at life. “I think I’ve always written slice of life—our own lives or people around us,” he says. “The big thing lately, and I think it happened accidentally with the EP—these songs that we wrote, that I wrote, when we were 18 and 20, that kind of earnestness and those feelings don’t change just because you get older. It’s just, the subject of them does. My reference for that: there’s a song on the EP called ‘Sorry’ that Jim sings. I still can’t tell if he’s saying sorry to his wife or his kids, but it’s the same feeling.”
“I’m trying to really explore this adult version of what emo was when we were starting out, trying to be like, ‘What’s a relevant version of that to my life?’” he continues. “If I was just going to write about how I miss my girlfriend now, that would be completely disingenuous. If nothing else, I think the one thing we can lay claim to is that we’ve always been really honest, and we’ve never done anything that was disingenuous.”
According to Pryor, over the course of a year, The Get Up Kids would “randomly get together” at a friend’s studio to record these four songs. “It’s going really, really well,” he says. “We’re actually getting along better than we probably ever have.”
They band are also getting ready to record a new full-length record in September. “We’ve got 14 rough ideas right now,” Pryor shares. “I would say maybe half of them were songs that Jim or I had written, demoed solo-ly—is that a word?—and then sent to the band.”
Elaborating on how the songwriting happens, he adds, “Before we start working on a song that we know has a structure, let’s see if we can come up with something just out of the blue. Sometimes, it works, and sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, you get some really cool stuff. I have this riff I’ve been playing—I had this finger-picky thing I’d been playing, and I was like, ‘Is this a song?’ and they were like, ‘No, [but] we can do this and this and this with it.’ We would end up writing—writing is a strong word. We would end up doing a first draft of something brand new. Off the dome, as it were.”
“I can think on my feet pretty quick as a songwriter,” Pryor says, “so when we’re coming up with random ideas, I’m singing kind of a word salad kind of gibberish melody. I’m going back now and writing lyrics to those songs. I can already hear things that would work better lyrically if I have another stanza [to] complete my thought.”
“Regardless of who comes up with the initial nugget of a song, it has to go through The Get Up Kids filter,” Pryor concludes. “Each one of us has to put our stink on it, in a manner of speaking, to make it a Get Up Kids song. […] It starts off as an individual sport but then has to become a team sport.”
One might gather that The Get Up Kids play music with the same collaborative spirit they use to play the game Kicker. The metaphor is quite apt, as they’re kicking off their future by being true to their past—by being genuine and honest.
Photos by Greg Jacobs
