Infinity Guise Track-By-Track Breakdown

Making it Worse

This is one of the first songs we wrote when we got together in May to start working on the album. We’d been aimlessly jamming and practicing old songs for a bit and decided to split up to see if having less cooks in the kitchen would help. Mitch [Gulish, guitar and vocals] and I left John [Parkison, bass] and the girls [Cora Kunda, guitar and vocals and Stanli Fryman, drums and vocals] alone for no more than 15 minutes, and when we came back, they had a fully fleshed out instrumental track that became this one.

Lyrically, I was really eager to experiment with the more spoken delivery and try to make a song that wasn’t just clever or lighthearted but intentionally and unambiguously funny, like a joke. A lot of times, having a bad time on tour can just feel like a skill issue because tour should be so fun on paper. The song is about taking a positive or at least neutral situation and, well, making it worse.

What Do You Mean “Guise”?

The first verse of this song was the very first piece of new music I’d written since 2022’s The View Never Changes. It’s kind of a reflection on the exhaustion that comes with living up to the expectations you create for yourself, and the selfish and egotistical motivations that lead you to give people those expectations in the first place. It’s about reckoning with the fact that I wouldn’t have to be so anxious about living up to the Mike From Summerbruise persona if I hadn’t gone and created it from thin air in the first place.

The song is about feeling a little too big for your britches and knowing that’s a problem, but not being able to stop it. At various points in my life, I’ve struggled with both insecure and egotistical impulses and intrusive thoughts, sometimes interwoven and inseparable from each other. It’s a song about holding two truths at once: you can maintain an elevated opinion of yourself while also feeling like kind of a piece of shit for doing so.  

Raptured Trax pt. 4

This song, unsurprisingly, had a working title of “Pop Punk” while we were writing it. When I first pulled up the riff, we all kind of laughed at how un-Summerbruise it was and joked about turning it into the sort of soulless and saccharine 2000s mall pop punk it resembled. I do think the intro still sounds like it could head that direction, but once the verses started coming together, we all started to love it. As much as our previous music represents most of our influences, I’m glad to finally have a song I feel like I can hold up as proof of how much I love Sum 41.

Lyrically, it’s a song about being in your own head, questioning yourself over everything you say or think, then questioning those questions. I think the line between explaining behavior and excusing behavior gets blurry when disability and mental illness come into play, and this song is an attempt at reckoning with some of what I see as my more toxic traits and which ones I can and can’t change. 

Meet Hell Halfway

Similar to “Making it Worse”, this is another song where I wanted humor at the forefront. I feel like you could reasonably call the last lyric a punchline, and I started to love the idea of a song having a setup and a punchline. This one was written more like our older songs, where I had already completed the song acoustically with my own idea of what the full version would sound like and then brought that to the gang. It’s the track on the record that I think points the hardest to the “old” Summerbruise, which I think makes it the perfect lead-in to “Never Bothered” which, in my opinion, is the best representation of this current version of the band we’ve been calling Summerbruise 2.0.

Never Bothered

This is my favorite song on the record for a lot of different reasons, but a big one is the fact that Stanli wrote the entire thing on her own. I sent a couple different riffs and lyrical stems to the band and asked if anyone had anything for them, and within a few days, Stanli had adapted one of the riffs into a complete demo with guitars, bass, drums, and keys. All I did was add lyrics, and the version on the album is 99.9% unchanged from that original demo. So of all the songs on the record, this one and “Sad Gimmick” (which came about the same way) feel most representative of this new all-hands-on-deck approach. The idea that a song could sound and feel like a Summerbruise song without me even playing an instrument really set something off in my head and made me so much more eager to include as many ideas from the band as possible on the rest of the record. This song is meant to be a sequel of sorts to “Never Lucky” from Always Something, and serves as a more zoomed-out and, in my opinion, rational look at the same situation but with an additional seven years of hindsight. 

VAN feat. Stoph Colasanto of Carpool

I actually wrote the lyrics to this one while Stoph and Stanli were jamming what I later learned was a new Carpool song in another room, which made for a bit of an awkward moment when I ran in with my laptop shouting, “Keep going, I have something for this!” The chord progression for the verses was among the random stems I’d initially sent the band, but the song really became a song when Mitch(?) came up with the main riff.

This is another great representation of how much more I like Summerbruise songs when other people help write them, because my three favorite parts of this song are Stoph’s verse at the end, Cora’s lead on the choruses, and the guitar lead Stanli wrote for the post-chorus. If anything, my proudest contribution to the record might be suggesting that we slow down the breakdown at the end; we listened to the rough mix probably 25 times the night we tracked it. 

Rusev Day (Say Hi to Kate)

So, our song “Bury Me at Penn Station” from Always Something is about my wife, Kate, but after we’d been playing it for a couple years, it became sort of our signature song and I started to embrace how well the lyrics could also be interpreted to be about playing shows. In turn, I kind of re-defined it as being about both, and started talking at shows about how the song was about the crowd and all that. Kate teases me about this all the time and would always ask when she’s gonna get a song that’s *actually* about her without me recycling it to be about something else, and from that, this song was born. Since the album as a whole is mostly about touring, I still wanted to tell the story through that lens, but I wanted to be certain that the tour stuff was just framing for a song about Kate and not vice versa. 

Man! I Feel Like a Dumbass!

This is the song that came together the easiest, and all within probably 30 minutes of arriving at the studio in November to start writing the second half of the record. We were eager to get started, so Mitch just had me start singing some lyrics from my phone while he found chords to go with them. While we were working on that in one room, Stanli was cooking up the lead guitar in another and we wrote most of the song in one go. Another exciting thing about recording this one was getting Mitch into the vocal booth. 

Cookie Monster Snapback

I’ve always been hesitant to write about anything other than my own experiences, because then no one can say you don’t know what you’re talking about. So this is the first-ever non-autobiographical Summerbruise song. It was inspired by a kid I had in class who was a model student in almost every way, but had already been completely convinced that the best way out of his tough living situation was to become a Top G or Sigma or whatever. It really messed me up, because any teacher in the building can tell you how horrible these influencers are, but I don’t necessarily think the ones who aren’t chronically online realize just how much reach these fuckers have. Scary stuff. 

Musically, this one started out as a meme. We’re all half-jokingly obsessed with the song “Ants Marching” by the Dave Matthews Band, and started playing it, but with Midwest emo chords instead. Mitch observed that it now sounded like a Hot Mulligan song, so I started screaming the lyrics in my best Tades impression, and one thing led to another. 

Bottle Episode

These are some of the oldest lyrics on the record, and it’s meant to be a dialogue between my future and past self (pretty high concept stuff, I know.) It’s a song about the excitement of living your childhood dream, juxtaposed with the shame of comparatively doing nothing with your adult life. Anyone who has ever tried to “make it” in a band can tell you the constant tug-of-war of feeling like you should be more grateful for this amazing thing so many people would kill for and also feeling like a complete loser for still doing it. 

Sad Gimmick

This is another instrumental that Stanli wrote from the ground up. I had also had the lyrics floating around for this one for a few years, but had a completely different idea locked in for how the song would sound. It was a fun experiment to untether the lyrics from my own idea of what kind of song they’d belong to and make them fit the song in front of me.

I usually try to embed a little bit of optimism at the end of some of the more despondent lyrics, but there’s no such reprieve here. Probably the biggest bummer of a Summerbruise song since “Busy (Ugly Before)” and one of those I couldn’t really write until I had some distance from the subject matter. So before you ask, I’m fine! 

Was The Grink There? 

Anger is a tricky subject for a man to write a rock song about without getting into “Babe it’s just the monster in me, babe I can’t help it,” territory. I’ve struggled with it since I was a kid, but never interpersonally. The only times things truly get ugly are when the anger is directed inward, because instead of being able to forgive someone else and move on I can only blame myself and stew. Even though I’ve never lashed out or been violent or anything like that with a loved one, various friends/family members/partners over the years have consistently expressed nervousness around making me mad. I’ve realized this isn’t because of the way I react to things, but the inconsistency with which I react. The same trigger I might have chuckled at and forgotten one moment could cause me to completely shut down the next, depending on the direction my mood is headed. This is frustrating enough for me, but I can only imagine the stress that extra guesswork puts on my bandmates when they don’t know if I’m being quiet because I’m a little sleepy or because I left my favorite water bottle at the last gas station and it’s taking all my concentration and willpower not to start slapping the shit out of myself in a fit of rage.