Within the pantheon of millennial punk, the Menzingers are our dive bar poet laureates. The Pennsylvania band’s beer-battered anthems are less loquacious and more crowdsurfable than the comparably earnest the Hold Steady, but a little too weathered and wise to resonate with the average Neck Deep skater bro. For the 20 years they’ve been kickin’, the band has been the same four dudes—guitarists and vocalists Tom May and Greg Barnett, bassist Eric Keen, drummer Joe Godino—rocking out to the same everyman trials: heartbreak, loss, and the growing pains that encompass the period between glassy-eyed adolescence and groggy-headed middle-age.
Over time, their gruff punk struts have gradually drifted toward Springsteeny heartland rock of the War on Drugs variety, but they’ve thankfully never abandoned their pub-punk sweet spot. The glorious three-album run that solidified their generational status—2012’s On the Impossible Past, 2014’s Rented World, and 2017’s After the Party—captured a band that was preternaturally gifted at waxing poetic on a waning youth. However, since reaching proper adulthood at the end of the last decade, the Menzingers have struggled to adapt their storytelling to their thirtysomething selves. Those troubles abound on Everything I Ever Saw, the band’s first album since 2023’s lackluster Some of It Was True and 2019’s similarly disappointing Hello Exile. It certainly sounds like a Menzingers album, yet it lacks nearly all the lyrical features that made their 2010s work so loveably, painfully relatable.
There’s no reason to sugarcoat it: As songwriters, the Menzingers are shells of their former selves. May and Barnett’s scenes of house parties and heartbreak used to unfold through vivid recollections of rooms clouded by nicotine smoke (“Nothing Feels Good Anymore”) and bad tattoo sleeves on friends who didn’t live long enough to regret them (“Mexican Guitars”). On Everything I Ever Saw, the co-songwriters’ lines about drinking in kitchens and downing drugs for breakfast feel vague and colorless. The rose tint of their youth is fading to grayscale, and the stories about their contemporary circumstances are somehow even less chromatically shaded.
The Menzingers know their most beloved songs are soaked in nostalgia, and Everything I Ever Saw loosely tries to take some distance from that comfort zone. “Born with a bad memory/What a fatal flaw,” Barnett admits in the title track. It’s a line that wouldn’t have been believable when the guy was sketching detailed portraits like “Casey,” but considering the woeful dearth of narrative construction on this record, he might be telling the truth. The album starts on a strong enough note with “Chance Encounters,” a gritty romp where Barnett squints at the blurry montage of his teenagedom to recount a brief brush with suicidal ideation. The instrumentation and vocals are delivered with sturdy conviction, but the hokey chorus—“We might never stand a chance/But we still gotta try”—doesn’t convey the same heart-on-sleeve sincerity as their older outpourings of rugged defeatism (“Good Things,” “Tellin’ Lies”).
That’s a running theme on the record: pleasant albeit predictable-sounding Menzingers songs with lyrics that make me wince to repeat. Longtime producer Will Yip ensures the music sounds chunky and slick, which bolsters the force of their punk rousers (“The Fool,” “Better Angels”) while also exposing the blemishes in their quasi-Americana overtures. “Other People’s Money” is the real clunker: the obligatory political song where a dulcet, Wild Pink-ish piano fails to dignify cringey barbs at “moon man” Elon Musk and other #Resistance-core rhymes about “lyin’ rags and MAGA flags.” As demonstrated on 2019’s flaccid protest song, “America (You’re Freaking Me Out),” the Menzingers have good intentions but not the lyrical nuance to tackle these subjects with the gravitas—or satirical humor—that they require.
Their talents are better suited for bombastic confessions like in “The Fool,” which starts with May growling, “I only like the beginning of things”: a simple yet effective line like a flash of drunken honesty. That’s as close as the record gets to rekindling the ragged poignancy of fan favorites like “I Don’t Wanna Be an Asshole Anymore” and “The Obituaries.” The musically towering lead single “Nobody’s Heroes” swiftly crumbles once you actually listen to Barnett’s torrent of grating clichés and gibberish non-sequiters. Advice from a chronic fuck-up could’ve been an interesting song premise, but instead of drawing explicitly from experience, he dully champions the concept of personal reinvention with platitudinal reminders to “keep your head up.” The Menzingers used to tell stories with characters you felt you knew by the time the album ends. Now they write about fragments of interpersonal drama that mostly serve as narrative fodder to tee up a surface-level life lesson.
Despite their tepid flirtations with softer indie rock, the Menzingers are ultimately a can-crushing punk band who specialize in sweaty sing-alongs. No one’s expecting Proust, but their older work proves they’re capable of more than trite metaphors about drowning in an ocean and pleading to return to shore (“Breathe With Me”). “I don’t want to relive, I just want to remember,” Barnett chants in “Everything I Ever Saw”’s yearning refrain. It’s a refreshingly classic Menzingers-ism in terms of its punchy construction, but it gets at the central dilemma of where they currently stand. They don’t want to turn back the clocks to relive their halcyon past, but without the pictorial penmanship they used to enjoy, finding meaning in their present feels just as impossible.
