Album review: Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! – Gone Are The Good Days

Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! are back with their fourth album, Gone Are The Good Days. It's their first full-length in six years, and it’s clear they’ve grown, expanding on their easycore blueprint with more dramatic and aggressive elements.

Among the standouts are True Colors, with its foreboding verses and a chorus that starts out confident and intense, before the band take it to a whole other level. Painkillers is similarly exciting, building tension with its accelerating rhythms and explosive breakdown. Complete You, which features vocals from The Dangerous Summer’s AJ Perdomo, has more of a pop feel, with bright guitars and piano underlying the whole song – and that’s before they get to the saxophone solo.

But there’s plenty in the album for fans of Chunk!’s older music. Gone Are The Good Days is filled with bouncing melodies and hard-hitting instrumentation. Most of the songs, like Drift Away and Fin, have a very classic pop-punk sound and energy, and there are some traditional post-hardcore breakdowns on Made for More and True Colors.

This album is clearly an evolution and there is some experimentation, but there’s more old than new here. Even the tracks that start off more acoustic or indie-leaning, like Marigold and Good Luck, end up switching to an easycore chorus. The songs tend to sound very similar to each other and at a point when pop-punk is broadening its sound and appeal to incorporate more artists and genres, the range on this album falls a little short. But that’s not to say it’s not an enjoyable, energising listen.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Neck Deep, The Story So Far, Four Year Strong

Gone Are The Good Days is released on July 30 via Fearless.

Read this: 11 pop-punk bands you probably don't remember