Yellowcard: 20 Years of Ocean Avenue

Everyone has that one song that they’ll hear on the radio and will instantly be taken back to an old time. For many, Yellowcard’s Ocean Avenue defined an era of young love and recklessness. Anyone that grew up in the MTV generation remembers Yellowcard’s Ocean Avenue album and its irresistible, catchy single of the same name. Formed in Jacksonville, Florida in 1997, alternative-rock band Yellowcard is an iconic name in the emo world. The band has produced ten albums, including Billboard-charting efforts like Lights and Sounds (2005), Paper Walls (2007), and Southern Air (2012). Combining punchy emo-punk and sweeping, violin-led alternative-rock, the band made a distinct name for themselves in the early 2000s music world. Since their inception, Yellowcard has always managed to inspire something within their listeners that goes beyond mere enjoyment. There’s this attachment, as if the band has become the spokesperson for our lives by penning lyrics that we’ve always come up just a few words short of being able to articulate ourselves.

In 2017, when the band announced their breakup it seemed to catch more people off-guard than usual. Their music was a safe haven and a voice of reason to a generation; they left the world with what felt like their final love letter. When Yellowcard amicably split following their self-titled L.P. in 2016, they truly believed it to be the end of the band. Yellowcard was the final farewell, summing up their twenty years together while using lyrics to offer a glimpse behind the curtain, often in an attempt to elucidate their decision – an album all about resolution.

After a five-year hiatus, they agreed to perform a “one-time only” full play-through of Ocean Avenue in celebration of the landmark album’s twentieth anniversary at Riot Fest in 2022. I think most people suspected – despite a lack of confirmation from the band – that the book on Yellowcard had been officially reopened. That reunion show inspired the tour that Yellowcard is currently embarking on, celebrating Ocean Avenue’s 20-year anniversary, quite a successful month-long run with Anblerlin, This Wild Life, Mayday Parade, and Story Of The Year. It’s not an anniversary that fans thought that they’d be celebrating with the band, and the appreciation that they were celebrating the album that’s sold nearly two million copies in the past two decades, and is considered one of the best pop punk albums of all time, was palpable.