Album Review: Broadway Calls- Sad In The City

Broadway Calls have released their new album “Sad In The City” via Red Scare Industries, their latest release is fast, loud and most of all it is catchy as hell, but this isn’t an introspective album, this is a release about the here and now as vocalist and guitarist Ty Vaughn explains “Sad In The City is about navigating the end of the most violent empire the world has ever seen. Making your way home to the ones you love while trying to avoid the police. Finding love and realizing how it still needs to be celebrated even as we burn the world. Dealing long overdue fatal blows to the state and the corporations they serve. It is a violent record for a violent time. This isn’t dystopian fiction. There’s a stain on the road, shaped like a kid. There’s a target on your back where it’s always been. And now everyone is Sad In The City.” 

Now well into their 15th year Broadway Calls are taking 2020 head on with their fourth album, on their fourth label, to date. The opening ‘Never Take Us Alive‘ sets Broadway Call‘s stall out, this is pop punk, but it’s an angry, joyful, unpredictable anthem for the end of the world and if you aren’t sucked into this dystopian concept album by the time the second cut, ‘You Gotta Know‘, hits the halfway point then you may have already succumbed to the ravages of 2020. Every one of the eleven tracks on “Sad In The City” could have been a single, there is no filler, there are no high points or stand out tracks, this is an album that just delivers on every single track. This is not a paranoid punk view of the world, it’s a faultless reflection of where we are right now that has been captured perfectly by Scott Goodrich, the man who managed to martial the chaos of Culture Abuse.

“Sad In The City” is the often dreaded concept album, but their is no self indulgence on display, just eleven perfect tracks of punk rock that are delivered with a deceptively upbeat pop punk feel that is at odds with the raging out of control dumpster fire that is 2020. Broadway Calls have delivered the perfect soundtrack for the state of the world right now, it covers the dark times we live in but delivers with the kind of fist pumping soundtrack that lifts your spirits. Broadway Calls have delivered what is easily their finest album to date, this is no slur on their previous releases it’s just that this is one of the best albums you are likely to hear this year. “Sad In The City” is the album you play before the storm consumes us all, it’s a soundtrack that shows Broadway Calls are not going to go quietly into the night, and neither should you.

“Sad In The City” is defiant, honest and born of frustration at the escalation of events the world over that gives you the feeling we are in the end game, but this is no eulogy, it’s a joyous wake for the world. We can only hope that things improve and this album will stand as a reminder of a year that many will be keen to forget, like many I have struggled since lockdown, I’ve have hit some spectacular low points, suffered losses, missed people and my social life all but disappeared, but on a Saturday morning when it felt like all these things were coming to a head I put “Sad In The City” on and it put a smile on my face. In the press release Red Scare Industries noted that this album is likely to down as one of the top of the releases in their entire catalogue, they aren’t wrong.

Sad In The City” is now available on CD & vinyl here and digitally here