Veteran pop-punk stars Yellowcard have called their comeback album ‘Better Days’ the ‘ultimate redemption song’.

More than two decades after their heyday, Yellowcard’s music is a pop punk message in a bottle. The tune that washed ashore long ago describes a simpler image of a young band, smartly dressed and full of ambitions, strumming their instruments — including a violin — in an echo-tomb of an underground parking garage in the music video for “Ocean Avenue” as the chorus kicks into overdrive.

“If I could find you now, things would get better, we could leave this city and run away forever, let your waves crash on me and take me away,” bandleader Ryan Key sang at the top of his lungs.

That hit song, the lead single to 2003’s “Ocean Avenue,” created a tidal wave of success that transformed their careers from struggling artists to global headliners and darlings of MTV’s Total Request Live.

“The first time it happened, we were really young,” Kei said, gingerly holding the spoon in his tattooed hand as he stirred a cup of hot tea. “We were literally a garage band one minute, then we were playing at the MTV Video Music Awards and David Letterman and whatever else the next minute.”

It is a moment that has not escaped his memory 22 years later. Now, he and his bandmates — violinist Sean McKean, bassist Josh Portman and guitarist Ryan Mendes — are far from the ocean but not too far from the water as they look out the window of a suite at Yamava Resort and Casino in Highland. Two hours from now, the band will play a great concert on 98.7 ALT FM. The set will include a wealth of older songs, including “Ocean Avenue” of course, as well as their first new songs in nearly a decade.

Before the release of the new album’s first single, “Better Days,” it might have been easy to write off their eleventh album as another release destined to be overshadowed by their early catalogue. However, with the right amount of internal inspiration and outside help from Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker, who produced and played all the drums on the album, the result was a collection of new songs that didn’t simply wash overboard. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Prior to the album’s release, the lead single “Better Days” reached number one on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart. This achievement came after a 22-year wait since their first appearance on the chart with the Ocean Avenue single “Way Away”. Key also notes that this is the first time fans have used the band’s new music in their TikTok videos instead of “Ocean Avenue.”

“This is crazy,” Key said. “Everyone is using ‘Better Days’. I don’t think we’re alone in that. I think for bands in our scene, new music is getting a lot of love and a lot of attention again, and it’s amazing to see.”

It’s been about three years since the band resurfaced to play a reunion concert at RiotFest in Chicago, following their farewell 2017 show at the House of Blues in Anaheim. When they were ready to go on hiatus, the band was struggling to sell enough tickets to their shows to keep the dream alive. For McCain, fatherhood forced him to also consider his family’s financial stability, leading him to enter the corporate workforce as a sales representative and eventually become a service manager for Toyota. At one point, he was responsible for managing 120 employees. “I thought this is what I’m going to do to take care of my family for the next 20 years,” McCain said.

After Yellowcard went on hiatus, Key continued to play music in various projects that distanced themselves from the pop punk sound – including recording solo work under his full name William Ryan Key, and touring with guitarist Portman alongside him. Key also produced a heavy electronic post-rock project called Jedha with Mendez, and the pair also do a lot of TV and film work. For a long time, Key and his teammates mourned the loss of what they had with Yellowcard. It was the most important thing in Key’s life, although he said he didn’t realize how much the band had affected him until it was over.

“Ingratitude is not the word to use to describe how I felt at that time. It’s like I didn’t have the tools to appreciate it, to feel gratitude and really let things happen and stay in the moment and stay focused. Because I was so young, I was so insecure about my place and my role in all of this,” Key said.

But some time later, a raucous 2022 Riot Fest reunion show reignited the band’s fire in a way they didn’t expect. They followed that up with 2023’s “Childhood Eyes” which prompted the band to move forward with a new full-length album. Along with these plans came the amazing news that Parker would be signed on to produce and play drums for them on the project. For a band who grew up idolizing Blink 182 and Barker specifically as the powerhouse behind the group and who has spent the last 20 years evolving into a music mogul, it’s been a surreal experience.

“We look up to him as a general,” McCain said. “It’s never lost on us that the best drummer of our generation is playing the drums with us.” “We know him as Travis now, but man, this guy is just a talent — he does all this amazing stuff and doesn’t seem overpowered, and he didn’t get distracted one bit. While we were recording, he was right there with us.”

Key says he was initially intimidated singing in front of Parker in the studio and had a few moments where he was overcome with negative and self-conscious thoughts in the vocal booth during recording. Instead of getting upset, he says Parker helped ease his anxiety with a few simple words.

“Travis came into the cabin, closed the door, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘You’re going to do this as many times as you need to do.’ “I will be here all the time.” Parker was truly speaking from experience. He told Key at the time that he had just recorded 87 rough takes of his parts on “Lonely Road,” his hit song with Jelly Roll and MGK. “That was a real crossroads for me,” Key said.

The aspect of the album that sounded closest to “Ocean Avenue” was that Parker never let them think anything of it when it came to songwriting, a skill the band had inadvertently mastered as kids in the “Ocean Avenue” days by writing songs quickly in the studio with little time to care about how the song finished before recording it.

“There’s something about the way we made this record with Travis, where we were going and doing it in a way we hadn’t done in over 20 years where Key said, ‘We’re going to write and record a song today.’” “It was a return to that style of songwriting where you have to get out of your comfort zone and just throw and go.”

The final product moves quickly over the course of 10 songs, and the tracklist begins with a burst of energy from the bombastic opening drums of “Better Days” that pushes the song into an inward reflection on the past. The film transitions into the high energy song “Love Letters” featuring Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba. Avril Lavigne lends her soaring voice to the unrequited love song “You Broke Me Too.” Songs like “City of Angels” and “Bedroom Posters” follow episodes in Key’s life where the hiatus of his band had a negative impact on his outlook on life but also on searching for a way back to reinvent himself. The album concludes with the acoustic lullaby “Big Blue Eyes”, which Keys wrote in tribute to his son.

Although the songs on “Better Days” often grapple with self-doubt and uncertainty, the fan response has been surprisingly supportive, Key said.

“I can’t remember ever seeing this level of overwhelmingly positive feedback. People are surfing these songs,” the singer said. “The recording was a whirlwind. When I listen to it, it’s still like, “When did you write that song?” It happened very quickly, and we made the record very quickly, but I’m glad we did. Despite the success, Key is hesitant to call the band Kids’ Comeback, “maybe because we’ve officially got a kids label,” he says.

“Maybe it’s the return of the masters?” McCain joked.

Whatever they call themselves, returning to the band after so many years of different experiences made Yellowcard’s second shot at their career seem all the more rewarding.

“Because you feel like you know you’re able to do something other than be in this band, and able to connect with your family in a way that you couldn’t when you were on the road all the time,” McCain said. “There are things that happened in that period that set us up for success as human beings, not just as creative people.”

For Key, it’s about taking all the lessons they’ve learned as a band and applying them to their future, realizing that the album’s title refers not only to the past behind them, but to what lies ahead in the future.

“This record should be the ultimate revival, the ultimate redemption song for our band,” Key said. “So far, that has proven to be the case.”