New Found Glory's Coming Home

09/29/06 6:30pm

by Paul Budel (CHARTattack)

New Found Glory frontman Jordan Pundik is feeling pretty good about his band's new album, Coming Home, their first full-length since 2004's Catalyst.

"Catalyst was more of a negative record," Pundik says. "We were all in darker places at the time. Self-titled and Sticks And Stones were the soundtracks to kids' lives, and that's what we're going back to with this."

It's odd then, that Coming Home is the furthest that New Found Glory have strayed from their pop-punk origins.

"Every record is something different," Pundik says. "We wanted to go back to being more anthemic. This one is definitely from a better place."

With the majority of the songs paced much slower, and with more emphasis placed on melody, the Glory crew are depending on their new sense of songwriting skills to replace the breakneck rhythms found on previous releases.

"We spent two months just demoing it before going into Morning View Studios in Malibu, California, which gave us about five months total to work on this," Pundik says. "Songwriting was shared more on this record than ever before. We had more time to explore ideas and work things out."

But will their fanbase accept a mellower and more mature New Found Glory? After all, two years between albums in the pop world can be a career killer for many acts, and punk fans are known to be pretty fickle about what they will and won't accept. The band aren't the least bit bothered by this.

"Regardless of what the punk scene is doing, kids are always into what NFG are doing," Pundik says. "Since we started doing this, we saw the whole emo thing come and go, and now the screamo seems to be the big thing.

"But our fanbase has always been consistent. There are always kids that are into what we're doing. I think kids can see that we're real, that we haven't been changing our sound to match the trends."

So what, then, does Pundik think is the biggest thing separating New Found Glory from what the rest of the pop-punk/screamo scene has to offer?

"Well, we're not wearing makeup and screaming at people," he says with a laugh.