Music

“It’s so rad to be on this wave again,” says Yellowcard frontman Ryan Key. “What are the odds of catching this wave twice in your life, 20 years apart?” 

Around this time two decades ago, Key’s band was riding high on the platinum sales of 2003’s Ocean Avenue and the Top 40 crossover success of its title track (one of the 50 best alt-rock love songs of all time, per SPIN), living their teenage dreams of headlining the Vans Warped Tour. And since reuniting in 2022, Yellowcard has been on another upswing. “We’re playing the biggest shows we’ve ever played in our career for three years in a row now,” says Key. “By a long shot, too, these shows are two, three times bigger than at the height of our career in the Capitol Records ‘Ocean Avenue’ era.” 

“It’s been pretty amazing, we definitely are feeling the love,” agrees violinist Sean Mackin, while noting that Yellowcard had a harder time drumming up interest for their albums and shows before they disbanded in 2017. “I, personally, have some scar tissue from feeling like nothing was good enough. We were trying hard and it was almost like we were in quicksand. The harder you struggle, the worse it would get.” 

It’s a sign of how well things are going now that when I call Key and Mackin on an off night between shows, they’re about to go see Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan in the same Indiana amphitheater they’ll be headlining 24 hours later. “We aren’t supposed to be here. Like, we just truly believed we were finished in 2017,” Keys. 

The Warped Tour itself also called it a day soon after Yellowcard, with a final tour in 2018. But with a rising tide of enthusiasm for pop punk, both are back in 2025, and Yellowcard will be at the Warped Tour’s Orlando edition in November, the band’s eighth year with the festival. They also appeared at the When We Were Young Festival in 2023, the epicenter of this recent surge of nostalgia for Y2K punk and emo bands. 

The remarkable thing about Yellowcard’s comeback, though, is that they’re not just playing the old hits but building on their legacy with some of the best music of their career. “It’s been a long time since we’ve felt this much enthusiasm and excitement around new music from us,” Key says. “The way people seem to be reacting to these new songs, it’s special.”

Yellowcard’s 11th album Better Days, out on Better Noise Music October 10, was preceded by the title track and lead single, which became Yellowcard’s first No. 1 Alternative Airplay hit in August. The band’s slow, steady climb to that summit was a record for the Billboard chart, as the trade publication reported: “The nearly 22-year gap between a first entry and first ruler is the longest in the chart’s 37-year history.”  

Of course, Yellowcard isn’t the only seasoned Warped Tour band that’s topped the alt-rock radio charts in the last few years, joining other late-career hits by Sum 41, All Time Low, and ’90s warhorses Green Day and Blink-182. In fact, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker has cemented his role as the busiest man in the pop punk universe, if not all of rock music, by becoming a part of the Yellowcard team for Better Days. Barker co-produced the album alongside Andrew Goldstein and Nick Long in his Calabasas studio, the Waiting Room, and played drums on every song.

“Just to have Travis at the helm and watching a guy like Travis Barker play drums for your band is so inspiring,” Mackin says. “It was great to have him as a guide and as a brother to try and make the best Yellowcard songs we could.”

“Sometimes the world has a wild way of putting things into place,” Barker told SPIN in an email. “Neither of us had planned on working together, but once we got in the studio, the magic was undeniable. I had just finished the Blink album and was excited to dive into producing another record front to back. Working with Yellowcard was a pleasure, and seeing them land their first number one is incredible. I couldn’t be happier for them.”

Mackin is the only person who’s been a member of Yellowcard through every iteration of the band since it was formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1997. The band’s first two albums featured original frontman Ben Dobson before Key became the band’s lead singer, and his tuneful voice and Mackin’s violin have remained the most recognizable features of the Yellowcard sound ever since. Mackin even has his own terminology for the band’s unique blend of instruments: “The ‘guitarmony’ between the guitar and the violin is pretty awesome, we can do a lot of things that not a lot of other bands get to do.”

Better Days is by far Yellowcard’s most collaborative album to date—all three producers contributed to the songwriting, as did members of Alkaline Trio, Goldfinger, and, surprisingly, Wolf Eyes. One reason for that is that Key, whose voice still sounds as effervescent and youthful as it did in 2003, had lost some confidence in his ability to write for the band. “I’m just in a different place, musically, the music I listen to, the music I write and record outside of Yellowcard, it’s just pretty far removed from what we were doing 20 years ago when we found that sound,” he says. “I was just really open to the idea of having someone come in and kickstart the process. And once that started, the floodgates just opened, I wrote two or three songs at home that I demoed just start to finish and brought back to the band.”

Goldstein helped provide the spark for “Bedroom Posters,” an album standout that may be Yellowcard’s next radio single. “Andrew was just noodling around in the studio before we got there that day, and we heard him playing that riff that you hear at the very top of the song, and we all were like, ‘Man, does that sound like a Yellowcard song,’” Key says. “We’ve been playing it live for about a month now, and words can’t even express how intense it is, man. When you get to the chorus and the crowd is singing those big background ‘whoa’s, it just makes your hair stand up.”

Last December, Yellowcard were getting close to wrapping up Better Days when Barker unexpectedly delivered a cameo from another pop punk icon, Avril Lavigne, for the ballad “You Broke Me Too.” “I was like, ‘Hey, I really just am getting big Avril vibes, I’m gonna have the violin and the strings kinda mimic a template that she’s already laid out,’” Mackin remembers. “And Travis looked over and he goes, ‘Do you think Avril should sing on the song?’ So Travis just made the call and sent us a little Christmas present. My wife punched me in the chest and said, ‘Is that really Avril Lavigne on a Yellowcard song?’”

Yellowcard’s lean years have made all the triumphs of 2025 that much more special for Key and Mackin, and they’re determined to savor this moment and deliver something special for their audience. “We are awash in social media and instant gratification and that really has, I think, unfortunately found its way into music, forcing a lot of music to be ‘content’ instead of creativity,” Key says. “And I think our generation of bands maintains writing music for ourselves and our fans, and that goes a long way.”