Eternal Boy isn’t reinventing the wheel with new pop-punk album.
The first few titles of the new Eternal Boy album — “Bad Days Are Over,” “A Long Year” — might give the impression that they just came out of the studio post-shutdown, or whatever phase we’re in.
Instead, the Pittsburgh pop-punk trio had this one ready to go before the pandemic even began and has been sitting on it for a grueling 14 months.
On Friday, fans finally get “Bad Days Are Over,” the second album from the band, which released its first three as the Spacepimps. It’s the follow-up to 2017’s “Awkward Phase,” which landed on five of the Billboard charts.
For the fourth time, the Warped Tour vets worked with New Jersey’s Chris Badami, whose credits include everyone from The Starting Line and Early November to Mary Wilson and John Popper.
True to form, the Eternal Boy album pops with bright melodies, churning guitars, sudden rhythmic shifts and good-natured songs about love and heartbreak. The change-up, “Promise,” is a mournful ballad with Cello Fury written in the wake of the Tree of Life shooting.
Last week, Eternal Boy — singer-guitarist Rishi Bahl, bassist Joe Harbulak and drummer Andy Mayer — will celebrated the release with a livestream from Live at 25 in Carrick.
The band’s annual Four Chord Music Festival, featuring Blink-182, The Used, State Champs and more, is set for July 17 at Wild Things Park in Washington, Pa.
This week, Bahl, who is a marketing professor at La Roche University, talked to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about “Bad Days Are Over” and more things Eternal Boy.
So, I was listening to this album and thinking, why didn’t Mark Hoppus ask you to be in Blink-182?
People always compare us to Blink, and I always take that as a compliment. When Tom [DeLonge] quit the band [in 2015], my girlfriend, who is now my wife, for my birthday card, she drew out the album artfor their live record and replaced Tom with
me. And for years, I always wanted Mark to give me the chance to be in Blink. But yeah, we’re definitely influenced by Blink. They’re our lord and saviors in the poppunk world.
I had a running debate with Ed Masley, who used to write for the Post-Gazette, about Green Day and Blink, where I favored Blink.
I agree completely, 100%. I think the thing about Blink is, it could have been any one of us. The relationship that Mark and Tom had, you could see yourself in them, which is why I think they broke. I just did a podcast where they asked the question, “What was it about them that made them break?” And I think it was timing: Post-grunge, people were salivating for something rock-oriented, and it was juxtaposed with this bubblegum pop, ’N Sync/Backstreet Boys-type thing, and they just found their place in there. A lot of people used to dis us back in the day, like, “You sound like Blink,” but, now, in our 30s, we really appreciate that, and they’re such a big influence on us.
So, did you make this album before or during the pandemic?
We actually finished this record in February 2020. We had everything ready to go. We had the vinyl printed and a tour booked. We were doing kind of a bigger tour for our stature, supporting another moderate-sized band in our genre, and we were like, “We’ll just hang out. This is going to be done in like two or three months.” And it wasn’t. So we’ve been wrestling for the last year, like, do we release this? Do we sit on it? ’Cause, a band like us, you know this genre, if you’re not touring or doing shows … We do 80 shows a year. We just decided we gotta do it.
All you people with your dated records!
We made that joke last night on a livestream, actually. We’re sick of them already cause we’ve been listening to them and already wrote them two years ago.
Did you write more songs throughout the year? Did you write songs about the pandemic?
No, I thought that was cheesy. Actually, I found it really hard to write during all this. I don’t know. I found it hard to write because it just felt like there was no end in sight. It was doomsday. I know I’m catastrophizing it, but I felt like there was nothing to look forward to, so why don’t I just sit and watch Netflix and eat ice cream?
I think I’ve asked you this before, but how do you go about making a poppunk record when the genre is sort of depleted of ideas and people have sort of moved on from it?
Definitely. Yeah, I think you’re totally right. I think that there’s very few poppunk bands that are really kind of like the bearers of the genre. The only thing I can say is that Travis Barker and his wide scope of music today is kind of bringing the genre back. You have Machine Gun Kelly, who’s making a pop-punk record, charted No. 1 on Billboard. You have other rappers that are now crossing over: Youngblood, who’s a U.K. young rapper-singer kind of guy, is super influenced by pop-punk. I do think that the genre is certainly not what it was and maybe will never be what it was at that time.
But we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We write what comes to us. We write what we feel, and I think for this record, “Bad Days Are Over,” I do think there is something for everybody on here. We put on the track that we did after the [ Tree of Life] synagogue shooting, “Promise,” that I think can go to a mass audience. We have a real pop song that we’re actually trying to go to radio with right now called “The L Word,” which has synth drums and kind of Moog [synths] in it. We certainly are, to our core, pop-punk, and trying to sell pop-punk to an 18-yearold, they’re kind of perplexed by it, but I think that with Machine Gun Kelly, it really is going to make it easier for it to be a digestible genre. But we just do what we do, and we love it. We have a really devoted fanbase, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this album drops, if we can break Billboard again like we did on our last one.
So what was the recording process like?
It was great. We did it with Chris Badami in New Jersey. We went to Jersey in February of last year, before all this hit, and we were there for two weeks, and we had it mastered by Ted Jensen, who has done Nirvana and Foo Fighters and Blink, everybody you could think of. So, sonically, I think it was the right team to work with. We added instrumentation that we’ve never done. We worked on time signatures that we’ve never worked with. All of that is coming from Chris Badami. He pushed us to try different things we never did before.
Is two weeks for nine songs a lot of time?
Yeah. It is. We had them written before, but we did pre-production, where you spend the first four or five days just like playing in the studio as a band with the producer, and that’s where they give their two cents on the writing and things to change, which tacked on more time than we really needed. But we’re a band that still believes that doing it at your home studio — it’s cost-efficient, but it just doesn’t make us feel like a real band when we do it that way. It feels good to go to a studio where they know what they’re doing to a larger degree than we do. It is a little bit of a long time, I do agree. It got weird, and the hotel bill got expensive, so we got out of there as quick as we could.
It shows in the sound. It doesn’t like “local band made a record.”
We learned that from Punchline. They were like our forefathers in the scene, and I always watched what they did growing up, like they would tour and then we would tour, ’cause Punchline did. They would go to record a record in Chicago with Mark McClusky; we would go to a professional producer. We learned from the way they did things.
So, do you write the songs together as a band?
I definitely write the music and the melodies, and then we kind of hash out the arrangements together as a band. And we all come from completely different styles. Our bass player, Joe, is actually in a Black Sabbath tribute band called Steel City Sabbath, so he comes from more classic rock or metal, and Andy is like the biggest Bruce Springsteen fan — but we all kind of met in that 2005 pop-punk heyday. I think when you bring us all together, it’s a weird amalgam of sorts, but it provides for interesting song ideas and song arrangements. But all the music and the melodies come from me, even though I’m the worst musician in the band, by far.
In writing the songs, were you tapping into personal experience?
Yeah. Sometimes, it’s about movies, like this song, “The L Word,” which is about this movie called “French Kiss,” with Meg Ryan. So like I try to pull from things like that, but I think, being in my 30s now, it’s a lot about nostalgia, about growing up ...
Already?
Yeah, my mom said the same thing that you just said. But, yeah, you kind of realize certain things. I think the realization for this record is that it’s not that, like, it sucks growing up. What sucks about growing up is the fact that you’ve tried everything or have an opinion on everything already. Nothing feels as new as it was, you know, like when you had your first kiss, or you drove your car for the first time when you got your license, or you go to that punk concert for the first time. And this record is pretty much pulling from all of those experiences, kind of trying to understand how, growing up, you have more of a perspective on everything versus trying it new for the first time.
Did music run in your family?
I come from a family of doctors, so when
I told my Indian father that I want to be in a band at 18, you can imagine his reaction. I have, like, 27 first cousins, and a lot of them are medical doctors. I was a total reject. When I got my first Ph.D. four years ago, my dad, he was [messing] around with me, but I thought it was hilarious, he said, “This is our son, Rishi. He’s a doctor, but not the kind that helps people.”
Oh, my. Is he from India?
He’s from Kenya. There’s a big Indian population there. He came to America in the 1970s, and he’s chief of endocrinology at UPMC Shadyside. Also, he was the host of Music from India on NPR for years. He did it for community service when he came from India, so he was real supportive of music. He was a bit of a trailblazer, so it was a bit easier to have that conversation with my dad about doing music full time. I think it ended up good. He took me to my first Blink show, which was pretty cool.
He dropped you off?
No, he came in with me. My mom, my dad and my sister. At Metropol. It was the SnoCore Tour, I think it was ’97 or ’98, right when Blink released “Dude Ranch.” It was Blink, The Aquabats and Primus.
Your dad must have hated that.
Dude, my dad is a trooper. My mom and dad have put up with more [stuff] with me than you could possibly imagine. Anyway, I remember Mark and Tom were selling CDs out of their van for “Dude Ranch,” and my sister was a massive fan, and that was the first time I saw them. And now I get to book them for Four Chord. It’s crazy.