Get Up Kids Opt for Less Love, More 'Darkness' on 'There Are Rules'

After the Get Up Kids broke up in 2005 and reunited in 2008, their ever-loyal fan base has been patiently waiting for the Kansas City quintet to release a new album. Now, on Jan. 25, the band is releasing 'There Are Rules,' its first full-length since 2004's 'Guilt Show,' on its own label, Quality Hill Records.

Featuring a dark tone and a keyboard-heavy sound, 'There Are Rules' is the Get Up Kids' most mature outing yet. Spinner recently spoke with singer/guitarist Matt Pryor about the band's writing process, the album title, starting a label and how they avoided getting into the fights that led to their split.

The album sounds pretty different from your classic material. What inspired that?

Well, [keyboardist] James Dewees is a pretty powerful force as far as keyboard players go and the way a lot of it was written ended up being pretty rhythm-section-heavy. That was the groove we were feeling when we were writing it. The thing about keyboards and effects is the more time you spend in the studio, the more s--- you can keep throwing at it and keep layering things. It wasn't a conscious thing. Some of the darkness of it was conscious.

There's no love on the record at all, and that was a conscious decision on my part. I felt like I could write love songs until I'm blue in the face and it's one of the things that this band has been known for to a certain degree. It's just to challenge myself as a songwriter to not write about anything that's formulaic for me.

What topics did you cover this time that you hadn't written about before?

A lot of it's about relationships amongst people. That's a pretty common theme, but it's all pretty vague and somewhat angry but not specific at all. I don't think you can tell who I'm talking about. I know who every one of the songs is about but I don't know that anyone would ever really be able to figure it out specifically. That's what I wanted to do.

When I was younger and listening to Fugazi, I'd be like "OK, I've been told this song is about prison but he doesn't say this is a song about prison." You have to really get into it to figure it out. I was trying to have clever phrases that stand out. Oh, I totally just called myself clever. That's terrible. I'm not clever. I've had a couple of good lines in my day but I'd never call myself clever.

Listen to the Get Up Kids' 'There Are Rules' for Free

What's with that voice at the beginning of the album?

It's a "how to speak German" tutorial that we got off of YouTube and effected. I believe what she's saying is "This is good. You will like it" or something like that. It has yet to be determined what she's actually saying but we thought it was just kind of weird and strange. It sets the tone pretty well.

Why did you call the album 'There Are Rules'?

It's an inside joke from a friend of ours. It doesn't really make any sense, but the more we dwelled on it, a lot of what we're doing right now as far as just creatively and business-wise, how we want to present ourselves as a band kind of flies in the face of traditional rock 'n' roll record label logic. If doesn't if you talk about indie rock and punk rock, but the more I think about it, the more I'm like "Why do we have to conform to what this band used to be or the way the industry thinks it's supposed to be run?" The whole point is that it's supposed to be a creative medium so that's that -- 'There Are Rules,' because there really aren't. I'm totally making this up as I go along, but I think it works.

Was the writing process similar to your earlier albums?

It's similar to our first album in the sense that everyone in the band writes songs and we didn't approach it as like a songwriter brining in a song and the band fleshing it out. It was "Alright, who's got an idea?" and "what about this riff?" and we'd just take it. All of us in the room would yell at each other and mold it into something that we liked and hash it out.

At what point did you decide to forego a label and do this on your own?

We decided we weren't going to work with Vagrant anymore because we weren't sure what we were going to do, and quite frankly, we didn't put a whole lot of effort of looking into anything else. The more we talked to our friend Jason, who's helping us run the label, it was like "We can do this." I know all the cogs that fit into this machine to make it work, so we don't need the loan from the record label and we have the skills to do the legwork of running it, so why not? It's could totally fail, but so far it's going really well.