When I was a much younger man, Broadway Calls songs were the anthems to the adolescent shenanigans of my friends and me. While there are dozens of bands that fit this bill, the thing that sets BC apart is that they have grown up musically and lyrically. They feel incredibly relevant to world we currently live in.
Early Broadway Calls is all about girls, being young, wanting to see the world, and being upset with authority—all things I deeply cared about at the age of eighteen. We’ve both come a long way in the last fifteen years. Broadways Calls’ most recent album Sad in the City takes stock of post-Trump America and says, “Wow, we’re screwed.” The same fast-paced, catchy pop punk is there but it’s smarter, angrier, and abruptly radical. The amazing thing is that this album was written before 2020 and it feels right at home amongst a global pandemic, government inaction, and racial/economic reckoning.
I’m glad Broadways Calls is still around. We all need catchy pop punk for when it feels like the country is collapsing.