ALBUM REVIEW: Gone Are The Good Days – Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!

If you weren’t one of the many kids sweating over the beef between FOUR YEAR STRONG and A DAY TO REMEMBER back in the mid 00s, then the genre of easycore might go right over your head. What is essentially a fusion of pop-punk with the more trigger happy elements of metalcore, the genre became known for its cheesy choruses and the breakdowns that came out of nowhere and felt rather out of place. With that said, the genre has seen success in the seminal Rise or Die Trying and also with the CHUNK! NO, CAPTAIN CHUNK! record Pardon My French. The Parisian group found a happy medium between thunderous chugging patterns and earworm melodies that proved good enough to propel the band towards success.

This success, whilst well deserved, wasn’t capitalised upon and the band quickly fell into what would become a six year break from the relentless touring and writing the band had made their routine over their career. With this time off, CHUNK! have created what stands out as their best work by a fair margin, with their blueprint yielding more than enough to really make this a corner stone of any pop punk fans 2021 musical diet.

From the opening moments of Bitter, with its slow build riff that opens up after a sample of the bands name sake, Gone Are The Good Days does little to take its foot off the accelerator. With six years of cobwebs to shake off there is plenty to get excited about, from the eight string guitars that give the album a girth few can compare too to the sheer scale of some of the choruses present throughout the albums run time. That’s not all as well, as CHUNK! NO, CAPTAIN CHUNK! even find a way to sneak a saxophone into everything for added pzazz.

It’s not all perfect, and the cheese-metre does stray into red more than once. And when you really take a step back you begin to realise there isn’t a whole bunch added into the formula from previous CHUNK! releases. It just stands that this is genuinely the best iteration of this band and this collection of songs does the best job at showing just how much fun there is to be had when you throw caution to the wind and just write music that puts a smile on your face.

Ultimately, that is all there is to it. There is little point thinking too deeply into an album that has fun as it’s core tenet, and you’d like to think the band named after a Goonies quote would be able to nail that pretty well. CHUNK! NO, CAPTAIN CHUNK! have done well to carve out such a distinct niche for themselves, as after this record it’s safe to say they will be the face and sound of easycore, surpassing the once previous kings of FOUR YEAR STRONG. And that’s a big thing. For a band to become the poster child of an entire sound. Give this record a spin if you need a burst of colour in your day, and keep coming back to it for the nostalgic joy it brings out from the very deepest parts of your soul.

Rating: 8/10

Gone Are The Good Days is out now via Fearless Records. 

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