Four Year Strong: What Comes Next With Brain Pain?

After almost twenty years of triumphs and turmoil, bagging sixth studio albums with a handful of EPs, a variety of iconic tours and a brief hiatus that had fans worried for the end, it’s been a whirlwind of two decades for Massachusetts’ own FOUR YEAR STRONG.

We join the pop-punk band for the release of their new LP Brain Pain, notably their first release in five years. “The anticipation for us as a band has been overwhelming really,” says vocalist and guitarist Alan Day. Day has been a founding member of the band and seen it all the way from its 2001 demo EP All The Lonely Girls to now in their exciting Brain Pain-era. “We’ve been wanting to make a new record basically since we put out the self-titled record. Making new music is one of the best parts of being in a band” he explains. Unlike previous albums, Day explains that this one had to wait until it felt right for them to release it, which took five years. “We had no time frame of when we wanted it to come out, we just said to ourselves – let’s put it out when we feel like we’ve written the songs that we envision when it feels just right for us, not just to finish it up in time to go out on tour or whatever.”

FOUR YEAR STRONG kicked off 2020 by launching full-throttle into the world of Brain Pain, first with two new singles Talking Myself In Circles and a title track however more recently they’ve brought out a new track Learn To Love The Lie with a music video. Day explained that their visual influences behind the music video were to make it interesting, but bass player Joe Weiss came actually in handy. “Joe owns a building in our hometown of Worcester, MA that has a motorcycle shop in it. It also has a coffee shop, barbershop, skate shop, event space, and lots more coming.” Day was able to shed for what’s to come, including another music video, “we have another video about to come out that has scenes filmed in the barbershop.”

The Brain Pain-era seems to be their most thought-out and beloved era to date, working tirelessly for the past five years it’s no surprise that everything, even down to the finite details of the album cover, has been religiously thought out. Day opened a window into the themes of the album and stressed the importance of conceptualising the imagery of the album to represent the lyrical messages, with identity being a prominent theme in this album. “One of the most common themes that we touch on lyrically is a struggle with identity. Who you are, who you think people expect you to be, who you feel like you should be; things like that,” he says. “On top of that we wanted to show pieces of the band musically – very pop-minded punk while being influenced by things that are so seemingly contradicting like hardcore/metal, indie, grunge, folk, classic rock, pretty much everything under the sun. So the idea came up of doing a person with multiple faces, showing multiple emotions. We love the artwork for this album, the artist Donny Phillips really did an amazing job.”

He admitted that in the past the albums have always been crazy but are usually something that comes from a random idea that they go overboard with, however with this album he says, “this is the first time the concept of the music itself had worked its way into the cover art and I think the continuity of it all really paints a bigger picture of who we are as a band now in 2020.”

Touching on their identity as a band, Day reflected on what has now been nineteen years of making music. After kicking around for so long he admits that there’s been pressure to keep up with the style people fell in love with; it hasn’t all been roses and tour fun. “That was almost the number one driving force of Brain Pain. Since our first record that came out in 2007, we’ve always struggled with the expectations of being that band with the pop-punk songs with breakdowns. Not because we don’t like that necessarily, but because we have so much more in our musical DNA than just that. When we wrote Rise Or Die Trying that was exactly who we were at that time in our lives. Our inspiration as music fans and songwriters is constantly evolving, and we want to be able to show that in our music. But that’s a hard thing to do when you’ve created a specific sound that you’re known for.”

That’s when Day revealed what’s at the core of this album, authenticity. “Going into this album our main goal was to bring back what I believe to be the most important part of the sound that our fans fell in love with back in 2007 – authenticity. We wanted to write a record that felt authentic to who we are at this point in our lives,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we wanted to write something completely different from our previous records, because a huge part of what we learned from 2007 to now is to be grateful for the things we’ve accomplished as a band and know that it all started with that sound. Being grown men and being able to look back and not take for granted what we’ve built over the last 20 years is a huge part of Brain Pain.”

You’ve been working alongside Will Putney to get this album out, what’s the creative process been like working with him?

Alan: Working with Will was great. We’ve known him for years as he was the assistant engineer on Enemy Of The World and Explains It All. Now hes doing his own thing and is just absolutely killing it. We knew we wanted to work with someone we were comfortable with since we has so much emotionally involved in this record before it was even finished, so Will seemed like the perfect fit. He really did an amazing job at taking what we had in our heads and turning it into a reality for everyone else to hear. He took the songs sonically to a whole new level, and although it may not be as apparent working typically with more heavy bands, he has a really great ear for melody and more pop-oriented song structure and things that we really love to incorporate into our songwriting.

There’s a self-titled track, that you released a while ago, on the forthcoming album. What spoke to you about that name that made you want to name the whole album after it?

Alan: Well, the album title actually came first believe it or not. A lot of the songs we had after being in the studio didn’t have real names, they just had stupid working titles. Brain Pain for most of its formative life was actually called ‘Heavy Song’, I think for obvious reasons. But when we were coming up with what each song should be called this was the only song that felt like it fit with the message of the album title, lyrically but almost more importantly musically. The song to us just sounded like Brain Pain.

Next month your record Enemy Of The World will reach its 10 year birthday. When you made that record you were nine years deep into your career, how did you imagine the next nine would look?

Alan: It is pretty crazy that its been a decade since that album came out. Even though it was nine years into our career, it still felt at the time so new and exciting, like anything was possible. I had no idea, other than hope I guess, that I would still be doing it 10 years later. And even more importantly, that I’d be doing it 10 years later with a renewed feeling of that same excitement we had while making EOTW. Brain Pain is truly a rebirth of FOUR YEAR STRONG.

And will we be seeing any celebratory events or such surrounding this album’s birthday?

Alan: No plans as of yet, but it would be a lot of fun to play all of those songs, there are a few on that record that we have never played live. I guess we should start practising…

Lastly, if you could summarise Brain Pain in one word – other than brain or pain – how would you summarise it?

Alan: Authenticity.

Brain Pain is set for release on February 28th via Pure Noise Records.

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