It’s not enough to say that The Greatest Generation is a great album. The Wonder Years’ fourth album is a masterpiece that, although less dramatic with age, set the standard for pop punk at a bar so high that it still stands a decade later to anyone who has heard it. The guitars crunched with rage and hope, the lyrics captured snapshots that somehow described everyone’s exact moments in life. To remember it is to relive it. 

On June 1, 2013, I heard this album for the first time. In the weeks before that date, when the album was released, I was preparing to move from Indianapolis to Chicago. My girlfriend at the time had left ahead of me, leaving me to make the trip alone. I’d listened to The Greatest Generation every day after its release and enjoyed the songs enough, but it hadn’t quite sunk into me yet. 

“I’m 26, all the people I graduated with…”

On the day I moved, the plan was to listen to all three of the core TWY albums. The Upsides (2010) caught the genre off guard with its positivity and cheery outlook, as well as the realism of the lyrics. The follow-up, Suburbia, I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing (2011), swerved again, ditching the positivity for gritty depth, stories, and follow-ups to the characters previously introduced with a heavier and nuanced sound. The guitars roared against Dan Campbell’s edgier voice and crackled shouts. 

Then came “Passing Through a Screen Door”, a song about anxiety, fight-or-flight mentality, the grind of touring, and the regret that everyone of importance around you has settled down in their lives and passed you by that somehow all fit into three and a half minutes. The first single to Greatest Generation, the song instantly caused me to both fall in love with it while utterly terrorizing me. 

The move to Chicago felt grim—my relationship at the time was becoming more fraught by the week, none of my friends were anxious to visit, and I didn’t know anyone in the area. Friends back home suddenly decided to move to Indy within a month after my leave. Kids were just coming into the picture for many of them, the rest still fueled on the high of their recent weddings. My only hope was vaguely figuring out how to make a living as a writer under the shade of skyscrapers. Somewhere, I knew this move to be a mistake and searched for a way out, or an exit when need be. I planned to fill my car with clothes and my cat during the night and drive south until I saw a familiar face if the stress of feeling alone became too great. 

“…All have kids, all have wives, all have people who care if they come home at night…”

The Greatest Generation doesn’t mince words or waste time. The album jumps straight into the very pit of despair and name it for what it is. The poetic verse in each song describes the antagonistic relationship that we feel with the world in general while telling stories that relate to the themes (“Teenage Parents”), often interweaving multiple layers in the same song. The heave of the music acts as a battle cry as much as it showcases what pop punk is capable of at its core.

Opener “There, There” anguishes in the torment of awkwardness and the need to apologize for slights that may or may not be real. “The Bastards, The Vultures, The Wolves” wrestles with the pressure of expectation placed on the band (“Now I’m stuck holding a bomb with a fuse that’s still lit / And yeah I came out swinging, but I’m still walking out with two black eyes and a split lip”) as well as the fight against depression in general. 

“Cul-de-Sac” details the trauma of cutting someone close from your life through imagery that shows both the desperation, decay, and futile hope of continuing (“I’ve been hanging on like poison ivy out of cold suburban concrete / From this careless urban sprawl”). Meanwhile, “Teenage Parents” describes the struggle of poverty through describing Campbell’s parents’ wedding (“When you’re young and you’re poor, they hang on your failures / And you always said it would get better”).

“Well Jesus Christ… Did I fuck up?”

I hated Chicago when I first arrived. The orange hue of the nighttime sky felt like an ocean that separated me from almost everyone I cared about and the task of making new friends felt poisonous. But the promise of “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral” rang in my head on a nonstop loop that pushed me forward. 

The closer of the album was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Over ten minutes long, the track not only weaved together choruses and verses from earlier songs on the album, it looked those ideas in the eye and screamed the pain they caused all of us. Taken from the song “A Raindance in Traffic”, what was already an astoundingly aching lyric becomes heart-wrenching as Campbell almost whispers, “I was just happy to be a contender, I was just aching for anything / I used to have such steady hands, but now I can’t keep them from shaking”. 

Facing these demons and scars head-on like this, after the idea of “selling out” a funeral and trying to stay upbeat despite everything (“I’ll stay thankful for mild winters, for every shot I got at anything”) somehow makes them more real and less scary. They’re a problem that we all handle and overcome. The anguish of the song burns like an effigy meant to extinguish them from the listener. 

Ten years after release, The Greatest Generation is still talked about as the heights that pop punk can achieve. At times, it feels like the rest of the genre is chasing it, at others it feels like it may have been generations ahead of its time. 

A decade later, Chicago was the best decision I ever made. I didn’t face all of my personal demons with the same honesty as this album (“I’m awkward and nervous”) but made amends in other ways. My dream came true because of ruthless pursuit and resisting the urge to fill up that car. 

I used to think “Passing Through a Screen Door” was the anthem to my life because it described my anxiety in a way I still can’t. But over time, I realize that only portions of “I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral” may have taken that award, since I still hear them play in my head almost every day. The final few lines of the song stand as the true theme of The Greatest Generation, and a mantra that I tell myself almost daily, and I am a better man because of the honest humility behind it.

“There’s no triumph waiting, there’s no sunset to ride off in / And there’s nothing romantic about it / I just want to know that I did all I could with what I was given”

by Kyle Schultz

Kyle Schultz is the Senior Editor at It’s All Dead and has worked as a gaming journalist at Structure Gaming. He lives in Chicago and literally caused dogs to bark next door when he screamed in rage at Manchester City winning the Premier League this year. Booooooooooo.