New Found Glory's Listen Up!: Sharpened, Resilient, and Built for the Pit

Annette Geneva on New Found Glory’s latest chapter — a record that trades quiet reckoning for loud resilience, proving that hope can still arrive with distortion and a circle pit.

New Found Glory - Listen Up!

(Pure Noise Records)

Writing this review, I found myself going back to 2023's Make The Most Of It to compare how I felt about each record. It’s fascinating hearing them side by side. They feel like siblings who took very different paths through the same storm.

Make The Most Of It was self-produced, and you could feel that intimacy immediately. It sounded like a band in a room with the lights low, saying the hard things without armour. Acoustic guitars. Space between notes. Breaths left in. It was fragile in a way New Found Glory rarely allow themselves to be. Less stage dive, more bedside. The edges were soft, almost unfinished at times, but intentionally so.

Then Listen Up! arrives and the posture changes. A big part of why it hits the way it does is the man behind the desk, Steve Evetts. If you grew up anywhere near a hardcore or pop punk record collection, you’ve heard his fingerprints. He sharpened the chaos of The Dillinger Escape Plan, gave weight and clarity to Hatebreed, and helped shape the punch of The Wonder Years and Every Time I Die. His work lives where melody and muscle meet.

You can hear that tensile strength all over Listen Up! The songs feel tightened, focused, built for movement. Where the previous record lingered in vulnerability, this one channels it into momentum.

One whispers. One shouts.

And hearing them back to back, you realise they aren’t opposites. They’re chapters. The quiet reckoning and the loud return.

New Found Glory have always felt like fluorescent youth. Skate shoes on hot pavement. Sweat in the collar. A chorus you can shout into a night that doesn’t care how old you are.

new found glory listen up!

The album opens with 'Boom Roasted', a strong, immediate statement. The guitars are bright and impatient, like they’ve been stretching backstage waiting to sprint. The drums hit with that familiar chest thud that once rattled sticky venue floors and now rattles adult responsibilities. The choruses bloom wide enough to carry a crowd. You can almost see a circle pit forming in your kitchen while you cook dinner.

There’s something defiant about how joyful it sounds. As if they’re saying yes, everything is chaotic. Yes, we have scars. Yes, we know better now. And we are still choosing fun. Still choosing connection. Still choosing to jump. “It’s just wordplay, for the right pay, so sing along to your heartbreaks.”

'100%' might divide people. Some say the chorus leans close to cliché, that the riff echoes older anthems. But that’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It spins it with conviction. “My word is cement, I’m gonna give you 100%”. In a world that feels brittle and quick to collapse, there’s something almost radical about promising to show up fully. It’s catchy. It’s mosh pit ready. It’s commitment carved into distortion.

Then the emotional weight surfaces more explicitly in 'Beer and Blood Stains' and 'Frankenstein’s Monster.' These aren’t abstract metaphors. They carry the shadow of illness, of fragility, of facing mortality head on. The band doesn’t gloss over it. They write it in ink. But instead of sinking into darkness, the record pivots.

'Dream Born Again' feels like a flag planted at the top of that climb. “You are the hope inside my heart… I swear I’ll never give you a reason to run.” That line lands as promise, as rebirth, as devotion sharpened by perspective.

And 'Treat Yourself' feels quietly radical. In a genre that once thrived on self destruction, here is self compassion. Rest as strength. Growth without losing energy.

There’s even tenderness threaded through the louder moments. 'A Love Song' carries lines like: "Kisses on your forehead. Your head on my shoulder.” It’s the small, quiet kind of love that doesn’t need a stage dive to prove itself. The after show stillness. The car parked with the engine off. The warmth that says stay. Pop punk taught us how to scream. This is the part where we don’t, we just listen and stay present. 

And through it all, Jordan Pundik still sounds like he’s bouncing on stage in his twenties. There’s that unmistakable lift in his voice, that bright elastic tone that once made teenage crushes feel seismic. It doesn’t feel frozen in time. It feels lived in and stubbornly joyful.

Listen Up! is a highly motivational album. Not in a corporate poster way. Not in a grind harder, hustle louder way. In a survived something and chose joy anyway way. It motivates through resilience. Through momentum. Through refusing to let your spirit calcify. 

For the pop punk millennials juggling real life and old dreams. For the underdogs who never stopped believing they could rebuild. For the forever mosh pit kids who now fight quieter battles. This album doesn’t say everything is fine. It says you can get back up. It says scars are not the end of the story. It says hope is a decision you make daily. And honestly, that feels louder than any breakdown.