Johnny Foreigner are not an optimist’s punk band. Listening to one of their songs feels like glimpsing the galaxy of bad decisions that led you to the present: the party where you had one too many drinks, the people you alienated when you revealed too much of your personality, the city you moved away from when you felt you had finally wrung all possibility out of both it and yourself, and especially the music you listened to while all these life-altering events occurred—music that, as much as it seemed to make sense of what happened to you, was made by people as hopeless and confused as you were.
So it’s ironic that How to Be Hopeful, the first Johnny Foreigner album in eight years, does its best to unironically live up to its title, to offer up a hope steeped in realism, one that includes the inevitabilities of disappointment and regret, one that knows that life is a fitfully boring/exciting/terrifying/depressing movie that resists any narrative convention. “It gets worse!” is how the record opens, guitars wavering behind Alexei Berrow’s bark as if they woke up still drunk. It’s the kind of hangover that feels nostalgic, like a warm hug from a former self.
What’s made Johnny Foreigner novel up to this point is their sense of scale. Songs are never just songs; they’re portals to memories recent or remote, to feelings one’s nearly forgotten they ever had. People are never just people: They’re tornadoes of context, and they don’t move through your life without altering it forever. A night out is never just a night out, when in the silence between drinks you can’t help but think of every mistake you ever made, and how you probably couldn’t have avoided any of them. There’s romance in failure, truth in mythology. Nothing is ever just itself.
All of that scale is restored on How to Be Hopeful, but a new dimension’s been added: love. This is the first Johnny Foreigner record with actual, earnest love songs. Previously falling in love guaranteed its bitter end, or else was unrealized, unrequited, converted from present to past as soon as it was recognized. Here, songs like “What the Alexei” are disarmingly, charmingly smitten. “I’ve been collecting data,” Berrow sings, “and every time you smile stars grow brighter/Your gravity/A super collider.” You can hear a genuine smile behind Berrow’s voice. It might be the cutest Johnny Foreigner song, even as the second verse inevitably turns its attentions to another song, with Berrow interrogating Travis Morrison’s pose of self-involved heartache in the Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Boston” (“Oh Travis/Boy I love you/But hey/Get a life!”).
One might’ve expected them to sober up and slow down for this shift in subject matter, but musically they remain Johnny Foreigner, as if every variant of emo-punk from Sunny Day Real Estate to Blink-182 were shrunk into a orb of space trash falling through the atmosphere at a million miles per hour. (They even quote Blink on “The Blazing World,” when bassist Kelly Parker sings, “And that’s about the time I walked away from him,” and Berrow asks, “Get it?”) Drums shatter through the songs like bottles across concrete, guitars come on bright and immediate as the knife-edged clarity of the morning after. “Museum of Useless Things” is their best bid yet for the world’s fastest fake American Football song—the notes in the chorus glow like light pouring through pinholes. However they’ve neglected to innovate or explode their sound since 2011’s Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything—their best album, where bristling punk songs, piano ballads, crackling electronic pieces, and spoken-word interludes formed an interconnected universe of heartbreak and disappointment. Innovation, especially in a genre as often static as punk, seems beside the point now. Now the point is survival.
How to Be Hopeful was recorded after Johnny Foreigner went on a few-year hiatus during the pandemic, and the prevailing mood of the record seems to be gratitude that it exists at all. “It gets better!” is how they begin the last song, “We Build This City,” and yet it doesn’t seem to contradict how the record opened. It gets better and worse. You lose more friends than you thought you would. You live long enough to realize that you know nothing, that you’ll never be adequately prepared for what’s coming. You learn that a “career” will spit you out as quickly as it inhaled you. But seeing someone laugh at your dumb joke still makes your heart flutter a little. Watching fireworks explode over the water still looks like new galaxies forming. And the next song you hear could still be the best song you’ve ever heard. “Whatever comes next/All pretty sunsets/I’d like that,” Berrow sings as the record closes. The image isn’t quite complete until the next line: “A perfect soundtrack.”
