The cliché “good as new” applies to a repaired Menzingers. The eighth album of the Pennsylvania veterans follows the divorce of Tom May, who extensionally repaired in the aftermath. The effect the event has on Everything I Ever Saw is less the sharp emotional hotbed of Death Cab For Cutie’s I Built You a Tower – a fellow 2026 divorce album – more a reprofiling of The Menzingers themselves.
The album handles the emotional ruin of divorce maturely. It is the most thematically personal moment of The Menzingers’ historically emo-tinged punk canon, managing to find a rejuvenation in a back-to-basics approach that helps to spotlight its message over any overbearing musical inflation.
If there is a newer ground explored by the band – or in this case, an inflated version of a somewhat noteworthy fascination – it’d be the heartland-y stuff that earthily contributes to the humanism of Tom May’s personal pain. Some of it is reminiscent of when The Killers would go heartland, including the piano jaunt of Other People’s Money, which adapts to singalong vocalisations.
Such a guise is an easy suiter for When She Enters My Dreams; a tuneful riling that breezes down a dirt road, the personability of which is as clear as its hopeful synthesisers. The song is plagued by the past, whilst the title track instead embraces the past, desiring retention for any possible information, for any and every memory, which it screams in your face.
Any keen ear will pick out Chance Encounters’ introductory likeness of The Killers’ When You Were Young; a lauded Springsteen-ism – or late-career Orbison-ism – that leads to the Menzingers making their own on Gasoline & Matches. On Chance Encounters, there are still hints of the band’s Joyce Manor-esque, explosive yesterdays, whilst surveying the glances we share with others, whether they will fleet or lead to love. One’s own ego, one’s own reality, is second-guessed.
The band’s reprofiling finds some focus on the toughened, heartland vibratos of Nobody’s Heroes – which owns up and vows to be there for others – but one could always make the judgement that, on these kinds of songs, The Menzingers aren’t really being themselves. I wouldn’t conclude that they are or aren’t, but nobody can deny the band’s individuality on the twee, stomping Better Angels, which spotlights the best of humanity in times of requirement.
Nor could anybody deny their being themselves over Romanticism’s urgency in scouring for affection, reporting on the highs and lows of love, what does and doesn’t mean shit to its narrator. This is infectious power pop, combining the twee of Better Angels with a raw, popping throat.
The Fool eschews complexity in favour of an assortment of recognisable, classic chord progressions that have done the job in pop for decades. The song holds up a magic mirror; you’re looking back at your stupidity, your inability to carry over the honeymoon phase to the rest of the marriage.
Whether nudging heartland rock or restraining for the good of individuality, Everything I Ever Saw is a good look for the Menzingers. Both sides of the band’s coin sharpen the mature approach the album takes in the wake of personal revival.