Somehow, someway, 14 years after their last full-length, The All-American Rejects are now the standard-bearers for their generation of pop-rock. It’s a weird little phenomenon, in major part due to how their ubiquitous hits don’t give that impression at all. Dirty Little Secret and Gives You Hell are both good despite how flimsy and kinda emo and juvenile they are, not because of it.
But where their contemporaries have fallen time and time again in bids to scoop up whatever ephemeral relevance they can, The All-American Rejects have stood notably independent. The fact they haven’t churned out gruel ever other year for the last decade-and-a-half is certainly telling. They also didn’t really jump on pop-punk’s colonisation by TikTokers, either, like so many of their peers did. (Tyson Ritter did appear on Huddy’s Don’t Freak Out, though that’s more the lead artist’s penance for its blatant Gives You Hell interpolation.) More important is their House Party Tour, a run of free, grassroots shows that’s been universally lauded within the scene and beyond. For a band with the mainstream cache of The All-American Rejects, an unreservedly DIY move like this in encouraging.
Even on Kids In The Street, there was intent greater than being guided by the winds of trends as far back as 2012. Some usual elements remained—plenty of gregarious mugging from Ritter, for one—but drawing on classic rock and glam-rock wasn’t what The All-American Rejects’ contemporaries were doing at the time, by any stretch. The point is, this is a band who clearly still like music, not just the money it makes them. It’s not wholly wrong to slot them among the nostalgia crowd; it is to reduce them to only that.
It’s a good thing that willingness has become so prominent, too, because Sandbox would otherwise be a completely different story. The more conservative budget of an indie release couches colicky 2010s alt-pop à la Twenty One Pilots or iDKHOW. The cod-reggae of Eggshell Tap Dancer and the doo-wop of the title track are like direct descendants, while Get This’ raw-but-not-really drums and Clothesline’s shrunken, blanched bass-patter aren’t far behind.
And yet, Sandbox as a whole really works in spite of all that. It’s down to the exact same intent that Kids In The Street wore so well, form-fitting to where the people making the music aren’t blotted out by auxiliary noise. Sandbox may bear some aesthetics of shrink-wrapped, faux-indie products, but it doesn’t have the void in place of a soul. It’s too frayed and untidy to even insinuate that. Besides, a line like Lemonade’s “I’m never gonna quit what I never even started / Used to call me…dumb” is even too insinuatingly near-the-knuckle to get past extensive, fine-toothed QC.
Instead, there’s an almost free-flowing nature to how Sandbox progresses. Never are The All-American Rejects thrown into discomfort, but even despite a less-than-bendy sound palette, there’s very little rigidity about. They seem good navigating power-pop guitar-walls on Easy Come, Easy Go, to synth-dappled pop-rock on King Kong, to a pair of homely, nostalgic ruminations on Green Isn’t Yellow and For Mama. There’s actually some solid variety to rifle through, and an equally solid approach to ingenuity across it. Even when the plastic fumes get a mite too invasive on Eggshell Tap Dancer and the title track, a non-conventional lyrical set for each (that doesn’t get caught in its own weeds, crucially) makes the difference.
The element that is a bit more mixed, however, is Ritter as a frontman. Perhaps it’s being used to a performance that’s more brash and wide-mouthed from him, but the deflated affectations that Sandbox cycles through just…aren’t the best. Get This and Search Party! are remembered most for how unenthused Ritter can sound, even if, in fairness, that isn’t a net negative to either. It makes more sense to turn down for the wistful country number Green Isn’t Yellow, though playing the accent up so much almost feels like deliberately fishing for ironic detachment. It’s strange; Ritter has always been best at larger-than-life projection, which gets all but ousted across Sandbox’s majority.
Nevertheless, it’s another instance of The All-American Rejects proudly doing their own thing which, as a whole, does need to be commended. Well done to the band for not taking the easy and lucrative way forward; there’s actually something to work with here. Moreover, by virtue of increased effort, Sandbox is way better for it. It’s more enterprising in what it’s willing to do, to the extent where some of alternative music’s biggest bugbears of the modern age can be given reasonable grace. That’s not nothing, especially for a band like The All-American Rejects, prime candidates to slink into perennial B-listdom and do as little as possible to get out. That’s not Sandbox, though, and after such a long wait to get here, it’s better than literally anyone could’ve hoped.
For fans of: Twenty One Pilots, I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME, Waterparks
‘Sandbox’ by The All-American Rejects is released on 15th May on Slick Shoes.
Words by Luke Nuttall
