Nearly three years since the release of their highest-charting album (2015’s No Closer To Heaven, #12 on the Billboard Top 200), The Wonder Years return with Sister Cities, their forthcoming LP and most transformative work to date.
Recorded at Sunset Sound with Joe Chiccarelli (The Strokes, Manchester Orchestra, The Shins) and Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, Jimmy Eat World), Sister Cities, out April 6, is an album about distance, connectivity and the way humanity towers above its boundaries.
“It is an album about how all of our distance might not be so wide after all and it was written with the world on fire and all of the songs sound like they are trying to build you a bridge from somewhere bad to somewhere bad to somewhere better. The Wonder Years are a band and they are also bridge builders” – poet, essayist and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib.
Vocalist Dan ‘Soupy’ Campbell on the inspiration behind Sister Cities: “It started with journals and photos. We started by documenting. We didn’t know where it would go or if it would go anywhere at all but we wrote it all down. We took photos of everything. And then when it came to put it all together, we had this catalog of how we felt and what it looked like and sounded like and we built from there. Figuring out what the moments were that stayed with me the most. When did I feel most connected to the people around me and why? What did being in this place during this moment teach me? It was a difficult year personally and globally and we experienced that through this lens of being everywhere but home, kind of floating through places and seeing how being there altered our perspective.”
What The Wonder Years do so effortlessly on Sister Cities is no small feat; through poetic lyricism, ambient guitar swells, and Death Cab-levels of crashing momentum, the Philadelphia-based group truly transforms. Whereas they once sang of the plagues of growing up, here they take a massive, unexpected leap forward both sonically and thematically, now speaking confidently to the world at large.
