
Never mind that I had seen them 5 days prior at Good Things Festival, I was shaking as I got closer to the front of the line. Doors were due to open at 7:30 but by 6 the line had already extended around the building. Since last time we saw them they have released their new record Sunnyland and recently toured with This Wild Life and Oh, Weatherly on the North American leg of the Welcome to Sunnyland tour. Our Tallahassee sweethearts graced Adelaide’s The Gov almost exactly a year ago on October 17 th. So, you can tell how excited I was for tonight. When I heard Mayday were coming back to Adelaide I screamed so loud my neighbours knocked on my door to see if I was okay. If you ask anyone that knows me what my favourite band is, 9 times out of 10 they will say Mayday Parade. “So if there are people out there dealing with hard times, we hope our music can help them work through that, and come away feeling a little better about everything.Project Description MAYDAY PARADE + Bad Juju + Yours Truly The Gov 12/12/18 (Live Review) Reviewer: Michelle Keesmaat “There’s a lot of sadness in these songs, but it’s always a good thing to get those feelings out,” says Sanders of Sunnyland. And with the release of Sunnyland, Mayday Parade’s mission is to continue strengthening that connection through their uncompromising honesty and boundless emotion. For the band, each live show offers the chance to personally connect with the dedicated following they consider more like a family than a fanbase. Having gotten their start selling their CDs in the parking lot of Vans Warped Tour, Mayday Parade have now headlined the tour five times, and will play the main stage again this summer for the tour’s final run.

It’s amazing and incredible that we’re able to still do this, and we all definitely realize how lucky we are.”

“We’ve obviously grown up and changed a whole lot since then, but through all that we’ve grown closer as friends and tighter as musicians. “When we started this band most of us were still teenagers,” notes Sanders. Gotten more potent, with all five members now contributing to the songwriting process (and coming up with upwards of 80 songs in the writing sessions for Sunnyland). Through the years, their chemistry has only

Since making their debut with 2007’s A Lesson in Romantics, the band has sold over 1.1 million albums, steadily amassing a worldwide following. “But even though there’s a lot of negativity on the song, there’s still a hopeful chorus, because I think we need to try to stay hopeful.” And to close out Sunnyland, Mayday Parade deliver the album’s stripped-back title track, a melancholy midtempo number that unfolds with graceful acoustic guitar work, delicate harmonies, and subtly detailed storytelling. “That song was written within months of Donald Trump being elected and came from feeling upset that something as horrible as that could happen,” says Sanders. While much of the album explores personal matters like loss and love (as on the stirringly romantic, piano-laced “Piece Of Your Heart”), songs such as “It’s Hard to Be Religious When Certain People Are Never Incinerated By Bolts Of Lightning” emerge as an outward-looking burst of anger. Whether they’re taking on a folk-infused ballad like “Always Leaving” or channeling brutal punk fury into tracks like “If I Were You,” the band sustains an undeniable intensity. The result is an album built on impassioned vocals, sing-along choruses, and deeply heartfelt lyrics.įrom the album-opening “Never Sure”-a tortured love song driven by blistering riffs and pummeling drumbeats-Mayday Parade instill all of Sunnyland with unbridled energy. The band recorded the album with longtime producers Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount, and also teamed up with Grammy nominated producer John Feldmann (blink-182, Panic! At the Disco) and Howard Benson (Of Mice & Men, My Chemical Romance) for the very first time. The follow-up to their acclaimed 2015 album Black Lines, Sunnyland finds Mayday Parade both reflecting on the past and pushing toward the future. “It was a super-creepy place-it was overgrown with vines, and still had some of the hospital beds and IV stands-but we have all these good memories of hanging out there when we were younger.” “The hospital shut down sometime in the mid-’80s but then it just stayed there for decades,” says lead vocalist Derek Sanders. The sixth studio album from Tallahassee-based rock band Mayday Parade, Sunnyland gets its title from an abandoned hospital where the band members used to sneak in to explore as teenagers.
