It was never just a phase.
New Found Glory is celebrating the 20th anniversary of their hit album “Catalyst” with a nationwide tour. Known for hits such as “All Downhill From Here” and “Truth of My Youth”, “Catalyst” is the band’s fourth studio album, released back in 2004.
“When you start a band, especially when you’re teenagers, you think you’re going to be the biggest band in the world. But to be honest, you’re not really thinking about 5, 6, 7 years because you’re in your teens and nobody really thinks about what they’re gonna do when they’re 30 years old when you’re 18. You think about what you’re gonna do tomorrow or next weekend or next month or something,” said Cyrus Bolooki, New Found Glory’s drummer.
When thinking back on “Catalyst,” Bolooki says that one of the biggest New Found Glory songs, “All Downhill From Here,” is one of the biggest songs in the band’s history. The band was riding the high after their previous album “Sticks and Stones,” and Bolooki says that the exposure on “Catalyst” was much higher as a result, causing more pop punk fans to have a chance to hear them.
Bolooki told amNewYork Metro that record labels were also trying to find a way to “craft [them] into becoming the next pop stars.”
“What we noticed was happening was that pop punk was starting to blow up in general, and bands like Yellow Card and Fallout Boy were coming out and every label was trying to find the next New Found Glory,” said Bolooki. “It’s like a lot of those labels were finding a band that they could literally mold into whatever they needed to be, like the best-marketed idea so that they could sell millions of records.”
What keeps New Found Glory and the “Catalyst” album, according to Bolooki, is that New Found Glory doesn’t buy into that narrative and just does what they want to do artistically.
“We’re not that kind of band. We were always a band that we loved the music we made, we love playing the shows that we had found the tours and doing a lot of things ourselves and just use the record label to help market us to help distribute us,” said Bolooki. “Things like that ‘Catalyst’ was a little bit of a response to what we saw going on and you can see it in just even the album art. We noticed that the record label was starting to figure out how to cash in on this, and we wanted to make sure people understood that we’re the band that does not like that, but we’re still very popular and we love the music that we play.”
On Aug. 21, the tour will be making a stop at The Paramount in Huntington, New York, a venue that is near and dear to the band’s hearts. New Found Glory has a deep history on Long Island, dating back to when the band was still up and coming.
“We have a history with New York in general, but Long Island especially,” said Bolooki. “We’ve played around 140 times in New York, and Long Island is just that place, it’s one of those spots where we blew up. We’re playing New York and when we’re not playing the city, and we talk about going to Long Island and now it’s been pretty much the Paramount the last couple of times.”
Thinking back on the band’s career, Bolloki says that the northeast of the United States has been a major player in supporting the band’s growth back in the late 90s. Being a band from South Florida, Bolooki says it can be hard to out of the state, and to this day, the northeast remains one of the band’s biggest markets.
Bolooki also noted that the ongoing growth of the hardcore movement helped elevate pop punk bands in those days.
“New Found Glory, we came up in this pop punk, but there was also a hardcore scene that was parallel to us. There was this cool understanding between pop punk, hardcore, even ska at that time, you could go to a concert and there could be any one of those bands, basically a mix of all those bands would be on the bill and it would be okay,” said Bolooki. “I feel like the same thing was happening in the northeast at the time, there was a lot of emo and pop punk and everything was kind of meshing together and everybody was just trying to champion their own scene. We really embraced that once we found out that New York had this parallel thing.”
With the tour on the horizon, the band is ready to hit the road and sing everyone’s favorite songs throughout the tour, particularly at the spot where they call their home away from home.
‘We know the show is gonna be amazing,” said Bolooki.
Tickets are on sale starting at $76. For more information, visit newfoundglory.com.
