The Menzingers
Everything I Ever Saw
EPITAPH
In 2022, The Menzingers celebrated the 10th anniversary of their seminal coming-of-age album On the Impossible Past with a reissue accompanied by a disc of acoustic demos, one of which was a stark reworking of “Sun Hotel.” Hewing closer to the intimacy of the classic Leonard Cohen song the original heavily borrowed from, the gentle rendition had the strange effect of bringing old memories into sharper focus. The Scranton band reliably came through with a new album, Some of It Was True, the following year, and they keep up the pace with their eighth LP, Everything I Ever Saw, which invokes Cohen once again, recontextualizing the line “I will remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel.” Emphasis on “will”: The Menzingers may forever be associated with pop-punk nostalgia, but they aren’t interested in living in the past. Reliving it, as the title track suggests—remembering everything in an ever more faithful, reassuring light—is a different story.
Consider the lyric that soon follows the Cohen interpolation: “All that is and all that never was / Don’t mean shit to us now.” It’s from the song “Romanticism,” the album’s emotional apex, one that’s viscerally specific about the sorts of things it romanticizes, like hailing down a cab instead of opening the Uber app. The Menzingers aren’t like other bands in the genre that seem stuck in perpetual adolescence, but as they’ve wrestled with the end of each decade in their lives—now their thirties—their best songs do so with bleeding conviction you could mistake for teenage angst. On the single “Nobody’s Heroes,” entering the future seems literally impossible without strained vocal cords and crying out loud.
But the darker, messier songs on Everything I Ever Saw aren’t wrought from a breakup—they’re about divorce. Thematically, the most interesting and distinct aspect of the record is the disparity between the life experiences co-frontmen Tom May and Greg Barnett are processing; while May got divorced, Barnet got married and had a child. But even tracks that store frantic, tightly wound feelings in the verses open up into comfortably anthemic choruses, some more wistful than others. One of the sadder ones is perhaps “Nobody’s Heroes,” which includes the line “You can always reinvent yourself.” You can, but you don’t always have to.
Musically, The Menzingers have mostly stuck to their guns here, working with frequent collaborator Will Yip for crisp, dynamic production and hardly changing up their formula. There are softer songs to offset the shoutier ones, like the Wild Pink–esque heartland rock of “Other People’s Money,” whose satire of billionaires in space feels rather trite in 2026; “Gasoline & Matches,” which adds a touch of synths, is more grounded and affecting. “It all blurs together and it barely makes sense / We were 16 once, we will never be again,” from the opening “Chance Encounters,” could have been lifted from practically any Menzingers record. On Everything I Ever Saw, they render it not as another shot of nostalgia, but a curious mix of relief and disbelief. We will never remember—let alone be—everything we once were, but it won’t stop this band from repurposing it.
