SINGLE REVIEW: The Wonder Years – “The Bastards, The Vultures, The Wolves”

May 4th, 2013

Matthew Leimkuehler

Artist: The Wonder Years
Song: “The Bastards, The vultures, The Wolves”
Album: The Greatest Generation
Label: Hopeless Records
Genre: Pop-punk

Songs of angst, honesty and passion… that is what The Wonders Years does finest. Those intangible factors are what they have built their tenure in this scene on. “The Bastards, The Vultures, The Wolves,” the third track released from the highly anticipated new record, The Greatest Generation, contains those intangibles, without a doubt; however, there is so much more to this song than first heard on the surface.

The track contains all of the comfortable elements of a TWY track, such as the tattoo-ready one-liners in the chorus, “I ended up as food for wolves, for trying to take the world on,” but the track also hits a bit deeper than a typical TWY song. For a pop-punk band, the song is relatively darker than the earlier installments released from this record. This is not a terrible aspect, by any means; it truly compliments the lyrical aggression Dan ‘Soupy’ Campbell belts.

This leads us into another great aspect of this track–it has balls. The Wonder Years have built a fan-base around honest people singing honest songs, battling the bullshit of trying to live an honest life. In “The Bastards, The Vultures, The Wolves,” the battle has appeared to take a turn for the truly desperate, from the eerie tone of the song to the climatic bridge with Soupy belting the words, “I’ve been burning every bridge that I can fuckin’ find tonight.”

This single has created such an internal hype for the new record; I truly believe that this album could be the one that sticks out from all the already great records released in 2013. After all, a generation only needs one anthem, right?

Rating: 9/10

Review By Matthew Leimkuehler | @callinghomematt