The Wonder Years: The Upsides (blue vinyl) [HOPELESS]

Why you'll love it

This Hopeless reissue puts The Upsides on translucent blue vinyl in a gatefold jacket. It's the first part of the trilogy that continued with Suburbia I've Given You All and Now I'm Nothing and The Greatest Generation, and AllMusic called it a diary's worth of post-college angst, hope and humour.

This edition

• Blue vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Pressed in the Czech Republic

About the album

Some records start with a riff. This one started with a fountain. Dan "Soupy" Campbell was writing on early-morning bike rides around Philadelphia, filling a notebook with lines for an album about giving up, when he rode past the fountain at Logan Circle, saw it had been switched on, and decided that being defeated at 23 was a bit premature. The band moved into his house for a month and came out with a new motto: we're not sad anymore.

The Wonder Years recorded it with producer Vince Ratti at Skylight Studios in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. "Logan Circle" tells that fountain story, "Everything I Own Fits In This Backpack" captures the loneliness of life on tour, "Washington Square Park" is about pushing through hard times, and "My Last Semester" opens the record with a gang-vocal shout. The jokes stayed in, too, alongside the most personal lyrics they had written.

After the band signed to Hopeless, the label gave The Upsides a deluxe reissue with four new songs, and it remains a cornerstone of modern pop punk. It's the rare album where the title is also sound advice.

Also at Kops: more The Wonder Years on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Hopeless Records (cat# HR2964-1), a reissue of the 2010 album.