Taking Back Sunday: Tidal Wave album announced

Three months after Taking Back Sunday announced the timeline for their new album, EW is excited to reveal that the group’s seventh collection, called Tidal Wave, is due out Sept. 16 on Hopeless Records.

“We started writing in between tours on the [2014 album] Happiness Is cycle,” frontman Adam Lazzara tells EW. The band wrote and recorded in Michigan and Charlotte, North Carolina, where Lazzara and guitarist John Nolan both live. “It was a great sense of home.”

The name Tidal Wave is taken from the collection’s first single, which they’ve been playing at recent live shows. “Even throughout each song on the record there are a lot of references to water,” Lazzara explains. “That’s why it seems like that title kept poking its neck out.”

The collection, though, may strike longtime fans as a retreat from the sound that made them famous with albums like 2002’s Tell All Your Friends and 2004’s Where You Want To Be. “Tidal Wave is a bit of a departure but I don’t think its coming out of left field,” Lazzara says. “We realize anything we do is going to sound like Taking Back Sunday.

When asked if he would classify Tidal Wave as part of the emo genre associated with their past albums, Lazzara explains, “Look, in my mind every album anyone’s ever written is an emo album because there’s a lot of emotion that goes into all of that. You can’t listen to ‘Hey Jude’ and tell me that’s not an emo song. I don’t like being pigeonholed because I think there’s more to it than that. I think this record highlights that very well, so no I wouldn’t consider it an emo record in the traditional sense of the word.”

He continues, “With our first records, we’re writing from the perspective of 17, 18-year-old kids and now it’s like as you grow older the blinders get pulled back and you have a different way of looking at the world around you.”

Instead, he says they were inspired by albums from rockers like Tom Petty and Bryan Adams. “There’s more of an Americana feel.”

Currently on tour with Dashboard Confessional as part of the Taste of Chaos run, Taking Back Sunday have plans to tour with Tidal Wave later this year. “Our idea is to go to the smallest clubs we can go to. We’d like to debut this record as honestly as we can and what better way to do that in a small club?”