PUNCHLINE,

happy and realized it was making music with my band. Nashville is great, but Pittsburgh has so much more charm as a city.”

With his return home last year, Punchline went back to being “four guys in a room,” the bassist says, and for the first time, they decided to produce a record themselves.

“I love all the producers we’ve worked with,” Mr. Soboslai says, “but at a certain point, with a producer, it becomes like, ‘OK, we can’t give any more time to this.’ But producing ourselves, we can decide when the song’s done, and we can rip it apart and put it back together.”

With the two founding members working together with guitarist Trevor Leonard and drummer Cory Muro, it was an openwriting atmosphere, with all four collaborating on lyrics.

“Every one of these songs is super personal to us,” Mr. Fafalios says. “I don’t feel like with any of these songs there was any, ‘Oh, we just need a line here that sounds cool.’ It was really thought-out and heartfelt andsincere.”

The last song to take shape, from digging around in the singer’s notes, turned out to be the opening track and the standout, “Friend From the Future.” It brings the album to life with a stabbing guitar riff and bursts into a catchy pop-punk tune with a freshtake on living for “right now.”

Another song that rose to the top was “Dead When It Hits the Shelves,” which the band refers to as “a self-effacing homage to frustration.”

“It was a phrase that I thought was a popular phrase, and then I realized that I made it up,” Mr. Soboslai says. “My girlfriend said, ‘What does that mean?’ I was like, ‘It’s a saying.’ She’s like, ‘You just made this up andbased the song off of this.’”

When she Googled it, it began to look like maybe she was right.

“Lion” has two notable guest spots: Matt Thiessen of Relient K — who first suggested that Mr. Soboslai move to Nashville — turns up on the super-bright and poppy “Darkest Dark”; and Anthony Raneri of Bayside,a band Punchline toured with in its early years, trades vocals on the dizzying rocker “Sensory Overload.” That song ends with Mr. Fafalios going on one of his epic rants, about good vs. evil, authoritarianism andnot being “a cog in the machine.”

“I believe this is Rant No. 4,” Mr. Soboslai says, laughing.

The goal is to go beyond the “over-thetop heartbreak songs” that defined the band in the early years.

“Being an adult and writing music in 2018, I feel like I’m starting to realize the message is important,” the singer says. “I don’t want to write songs that are preachy, but I want to write songs with an impact that makes people realize that everyone is going through the human experience and everyone is completely troubled by it. It’s so easy to forget that everyone going through the experience at some point every day stops and goes, ‘What the [expletive] am I doing?’ I want them to feel that they’re not alone.”