The Get Up Kids' new album, Guilt Show, is something of an about-face for the Kansas City-bred quintet.

"We were like, 'We gotta get back to play some rock,'" explains singer and principal songwriter Matt Pryor. "The only real understanding going into making Guilt Show was that we wanted to make it loud. We all loved [2002's] On a Wire, but to play it live, we were struggling with the flow of the set. The songs were too mellow. There was just too much slow." After recording that album with producer Scott Litt, Pryor and his longtime bandmates -- bassist Rob Pope, guitarist Jim Suptic, keyboardist James Dewees and drummer Ryan Pope -- blew their recording budget in their own backyard. Partnering up with producer Ed Rose, the group bought a Eudora, Kansas, studio and christened it the Black Lodge. It was there, throughout much of 2003, that the Get Up Kids made what Matt calls their best album yet.

"I'm really, really proud of this one," he says. "We took everything that we learned over the last eight years and put it into one cohesive thought. Of course, our newest record is always my favorite. That's the idea when we make a record -- to have the new one make all the earlier ones obsolete."

Pryor cites the piano-laced, drum-stomping "Never Be Alone," a tune the band recently reworked as an iTunes exclusive, as his favorite. "It's the one song on our album that I haven't ever gotten sick of," he says. "I wrote that song in March of last year and I couldn't get it out of my head, so I did a demo of it right away."

"Holy Roman," which takes shots at the current administration, was influenced by Pryor's new role as a father; the twenty-six-year-old has a two-year-old daughter and another child on the way. "Ever since I've become a parent I've become way more aware of what's going on in the world and life outside of rock & roll," Pryor says. "'Holy Roman' is probably the most political thing I've ever written."

While the song's lyrics reveal a disdain for George W. Bush, the music reveals a love for Elvis Costello. "You can listen to Elvis' Get Happy and think, 'These are just straight-up verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, but they're still interesting,'" Pryor says. "And there's nothing contrived. Not that I'm not trying to compare our band to the Attractions, but we're also trying to make pop music that isn't boring."

With a March trek across North America, a spring tour of Japan and another U.S. tour in the early summer, the Get Up Kids will spend much of 2004 on the road -- something Pryor doesn't relish. "Going on the road fucking sucks for me," he says. "It's so hard to be away. I love the two hours that we're on stage, but the other twenty-two hours a day are fucking terrible. It's a cliche to say that having kids changes everything, but it really, really does."

And the Get Up Kids are in no hurry to sign up as a support act for a package tour. The band has opened for Green Day, who Pryor calls "the nicest guys ever," and Weezer, who he calls "dicks." "It very much rubbed me the wrong way," he says of the outing with Rivers Cuomo and Co. "So we we're like, 'Fuck it. We're just gonna blow your ass off the stage.' It really made us want to work harder."

JOHN D. LUERSSEN
(March 2, 2004)