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New Found Glory's Cyrus Bolooki + Tiana Speter Chat Riff City, Disney Money, New Album "Listen Up!" + More
- Tiana Speter
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
In 2026, New Found Glory not only have arrived at a brand new chapter of their career via the release of their 11th studio album Listen Up!, officially out now via Pure Noise Records; they have ascended to glorious new heights.
Against the backdrop of a world gone mad, significant health issues faced by founding member Chad Gilbert and the weight of expectation that often goes hand in hand with any band who defined a genre in their formative years (and has continued to thrive to this very day), the Florida-hailing pop punk icons known collectively as New Found Glory are anything but content to rest on their well-earned laurels now close to 30 years into their career.
Via Listen Up!, also their first ever release with Pure Noise, New Found Glory weave familiar territory with a breath of galvanised air across 10 tracks. Sure, songs about youth, nostalgia and love still appear in measured moments on the record. But rather than non-stop teenage/youthful angst or matters of the heart swirling from start to finish, Listen Up! ultimately enraptures with matured resilience and lashings of non-toxic positivity. It's an album with heart. It's an album that will clutch at your soul more than once, while also threatening to incite a beautifully chaotic party that will end with parts of the ceiling strewn on the floor around you. And, in true New Found Glory fashion, all of this is achieved with infectious melodies and buoyant arrangements. But also notably on this album rodeo, the band also collectively take us all to "Riff City"; a phrase coined when I joined drummer and prolific sonic architect Cyrus Bolooki in a chat just before the album dropped.
"You have to count back almost six years since we had done an actual New Found Glory record heavy with riffs, going back to "Riff City". So there were a lot of those stored rifts, nowadays it's on voice memos on a phone. Chad's diagnosis and his battle with cancer, it's ever changing and it's kind of hard to predict what's going to happen with him, how he's going to feel. But we did carve out a few weeks about a year ago, and we made plans to sit in the loft in his house upstairs and just jam on some riffs that he had in his back pocket and we put together a collection of songs that we were very happy with." - Cyrus Bolooki
Spanning everything from the writing process through to potentially spending some spare Disney money to bring the album's single 100% to life (shh!), playing shows with no barricade at this stage in their career, how Cyrus "treats himself" away from the realities life as a musician and more, come join me, Tiana Speter in a dive behind the scenes of Listen Up! with Cyrus Bolooki. Watch below and be sure to give the album a spin while you're at it!
BY TIANA SPETER
