Midwest emo no longer has to be from the Midwest and it doesn’t even need to be emo, and, for that, you can thank this one line from Algernon Cadwallader’s “Motivational Song”: “So if fucking up feels right/Then fuck it up!”
It’s a great hook and also the entire ethos of the transformative scene that sprung up around Algernon Cadwallader in Pennsylvania in the late 2000s. The quartet band out among other scrappy, spirited groups like Snowing, Glocca Morra, Street Smart Cyclist, and Marietta that reclaimed “the whole Chicago ’90s emo thing” of Cap’n Jazz and American Football at a time when the genre’s credibility was at its lowest ebb. These groups made small and indispensable catalogs of music and then broke up right before a more traditionally artsy and ambitious wave made the “emo revival” a mainstream concern.
Frontman Peter Helmis was ambivalent about capitalizing on that renewed interest. Algernon Cadwallader reissued their catalog in 2018, and Helmis guessed it would take at least another decade before they reunited, if they ever did at all. His bandmates had started families, careers, and plenty of other bands. (Helmis alone fronted Yankee Bluff and Dogs on Acid, while guitarist Joe Reinhart took his slip-n-slide riffs to Hop Along and produced scene classics from Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor and Awakebutstillinbed.) Helmis was off by about six years, and, in 2022, Algernon played to crowds that eclipsed any they ever saw at their peak, filled with teenagers who would have to agree with Helmis’ claim that there was “something unattainable” about the band during its existence.
If Helmis couldn’t keep his promise about the timetable of Algernon’s reunion, he did hold firm in his belief that Algernon couldn’t simply be a reunion band playing old album run-throughs at Best Friends Forever and Florida’s Fest. So he and his bandmates made a new album. Trying Not to Have a Thought doesn’t pick up where Algernon left off on 2011’s underappreciated Parrot Flies. It imagines an alternate history where all of the members channeled their artistic evolution from their many, many projects right back into Algernon Cadwallader, as if that had been the plan all along.
The result is one of the finest rock albums of 2025, genre be damned. It’s politically pointed and personally poignant, unpredictable and virtuosic. Now two decades into their career, Algernon Cadwallader can relate a straightforward history lesson about the 1985 MOVE bombing that fits right alongside their older DIY house anthems and newer experiments like “noitanitsarcorP,” a tribute to the creative process that emerged from a group ketamine trip; “I played the same drum beat for, like, 25 minutes,” Nick Tazza recalls. “And I remember being like, that was the most beautiful thing we ever wrote.”
With the original lineup of Helmis, Reinhart, Tazza and guitarist Colin Mahony together for the first time since their debut, Some Kind of Cadwallader, the same “if it feels good, do it” spirit of 2008 pervades Trying Not to Have a Thought. “We wrote a bunch of songs in Joe’s parents’ basement,” Helmis reflects. “And now we’re writing these new songs fucking 20 years later in Joe’s own basement.”
Everything that keeps us together is falling apart on Trying Not to Have a Thought—high school friends die tragically before their time, endless war continues unabated, the working class is one paycheck away from poverty, and the social safety net is hanging on by a thread. The urgency of speaking to these anxieties while the creative spark burned hot allowed Algernon Cadwallader to write their first album in 14 years within a few weeks at retreats in Snoqualmie, Washington, and the Poconos. “I think it makes you appreciate the time that we are spending together; it’s more like an affirmation,” Helmis states in my Zoom call with him, Joe Reinhart, and Nick Tazza. “Don’t fuck around. This time is fleeting. Always focus on the good. Appreciate every second.”
Nick Tazza: I don't think we’ve ever really stopped being in touch with each other, regardless if we’re making music or just fucking off. When I moved out to Seattle, Peter was the first person who came to see me. We’ve always been involved in each other’s lives.
Peter Helmis: With the exception of our fucking boy Colin [laughs]. He was an original founding member and also one of the first humans that I ever started playing music with, and he left pretty abruptly before Some Kind of Cadwallader came out. I saw him twice over the period of, like, a decade. We were all going different paths and moving at a million miles an hour. He was a father and getting a steady job and just trying to keep his life on track. So, once we got together for the reunion, it was fucking awesome and so much fun. He’s the one person who I feel like actually changed the least since high school; he’s so funny at all times. That helped put us in the mindset to write a record like this, the four of us all back together.
Helmis: We have never worried about how we’ll be received. In fact, if anything, we’ll steer something in another direction if we think it’s gonna be perceived too well.
Joe Reinhart: That’s about as far as we go, as pre-meditation is concerned.
Helmis: I’m glad you’re aware of MOVE, being from Philadelphia. I feel like it should be like one of our country’s most horrific tragedies of all time, but it’s somehow pretty much buried. Obviously, there’s information and documentaries out there, but it’s not talked about as widely as it should be. I feel like it ties into every other event that happened in Philadelphia before and afterwards. Growing up in the scene when we did, in the early 2000s, you’d go to punk shows and there would always be “Free Mumia” flyers. I remember as a teenager just being like, “Oh shit, like what is this? I got to know what these people are talking about.” That left a real impact on me. But I feel like by the time we moved to the city and started our bands, that fell off a little bit. And maybe we were responsible for some of that. I thought about that over the years and how that's pretty fucking unfortunate, you know?
But it’s twofold: us being a band again and having an audience, knowing that people are listening and also seeing all these super young kids on the reunion tour, we’re speaking to another generation here. There’s obviously a few songs that were about the current world we live in—America, the empire. I didn’t want to premeditate it, this is what’s going on in my mind and probably everybody’s mind these days. It’s just overwhelming, which is where the title of the record comes from; “trying not to have a thought” is a euphemism for, like, meditation and trying to free the mind. But this is all the stuff that's rushing in all the time.
Helmis: “This is the utopia,” the “white utopia” is how this state [Oregon] was founded. It was very clear when I first moved here and—I think Nick can probably relate to this—you see [the homelessness] so much more than back in the East Coast. I always saw people in the streets everywhere [in Philadelphia], but the camps out here on the West Coast, and especially in the Pacific Northwest, is just the first thing you notice. I don’t know if it’s just less swept under the rug.
Nick Tazza: One common thread through everything is that it’s all kind of fucked in a similar way. I think Philadelphia is denser and you feel the anxiety of it a lot more. Out here [in Seattle], it’s definitely more chill, but you see the wealth disparity a lot more clearly, where I see people like us who are “normal” and have working jobs, but they’re fucking on the street. I do think there’s better social services on the East Coast; at least it seems that way. I feel like people are more able to get housing a little easier on the East Coast; there’s more shelters for them to go to. I live in a pretty chill area, but the cops fucking suck, same bullshit.
Helmis: I’ve thought about this and it’s like… we’re a fucking band, first and foremost. We write music; that’s our purpose. The message is on top of this music because we wrote this music and then we wrote these lyrics and we smashed them together. And I love the juxtaposition of that. We’re having fun, you know, pointing fingers and talking shit and calling out the bullshit.
Tazza: I would say we’ve always been punk kids and always viewed Algernon as a punk band. It’s just been an extension of what we’ve always done. And I think it’s really cool to see Peter align the band that way. I’ve always loved Peter’s lyrics, and, in Algernon, they become more avant-garde, more ephemeral. Then we did Dogs on Acid, and Peter’s lyricism and his delivery became even more amazing and now to see the clarity of the message along with the music is awesome. I also think we’re at a point now where if you’re not using your fucking voice to promote something, it’s a waste.
Helmis: I’ve always recognized that the music that means the most to me—my favorite bands, favorite records—is what I listen to the least, just because they’re already up here [points to head]. So I seek out that stuff live. Seeing Cap’n Jazz these days is unreal. They’ve gotten even better, and the music has gotten more relevant somehow. But I listen to Joan of Arc at least once a month. If I want to listen to something, I can’t think of what, it’s like, “well, let me just pick a Joan of Arc record.” Incredible catalog; they could have been 12 different bands.
Reinhart: I think about that a lot when I’m working with bands. I’ll [produce] their first record and you can tell they only ever played these songs in small rooms because everybody’s playing bass chords and hitting every part of the drum at the part of the song they want to be loud. But once you get into these rooms where there’s space and big low end, I’ve heard bands come back and have more of those sorts of textures in their music. I don’t know if we made any of those decisions consciously, but I was pushing the energy in the music. Seventy percent of what I listen to has that melodic punk push to it, and I think it was consciously making stuff like that and then, yeah, some of it was a ketamine jam.
Tazza: Joe wrote a fucking ska part on this record, and that’s the sickest thing of all time.
Helmis: You got to go back and find that ska Easter egg.
Helmis: I can’t wait.
Reinhart: I was thinking about that today, like, man, when are we doing Europe or other countries? Maybe we should just plan to write an EP before any of that stuff happens. What are we doing? Are we just going to sit around in January? Let’s fucking do something.
