In their early days of touring, every night was a party for Mayday Parade. The Tallahassee pop-punkers would hit a new city, play for small yet impassioned crowds, make friends with the locals — and always find a place to party (and crash) at night. In the morning, all five members, (lead singer Derek Sanders, drummer Jake Bundrick, bassist Jeremy Lenzo, guitarist Alex Garcia, and guitarist Brooks Betts) would cram back into their van, exhausted and ready to do it all over again. They were in their late teens and early twenties, making that chapter of their lives feel like a college experience with a punk-rock twist.
“It’s hard to imagine really any experience in life being much better than that,” Sanders tells Rolling Stone. “To me, it was like magic when this band started.”
Bundrick couldn’t agree more. “It was a wild lifestyle, but it was a lot of fun,” he says. Lately, Sanders, Bundrick, and the rest of the band have been reflecting on Mayday Parade’s past more than usual as they gear up to celebrate their 20th anniversary.
Formed back in 2005 in Tallahassee, Florida, Mayday Parade built a dedicated following after handing out thousands of CD copies of their 2006 EP Tales Told By Dead Friends to Warped Tour attendees. A year later, after signing to Fearless Records, Mayday Parade not only became mainstays of the festival, they also proved themselves to be pivotal players in emo’s third wave with their debut LP, A Lesson In Romantics. A mix of explosive anthems like “Jersey” and emotionally fraught ballads, like the piercing “Miserable at Best,” made the album an instant emo classic.
In fact, soundtracking heartbreak and angst became Mayday Parade’s specialty with their extremely quotable, melodramatic lyrics. Just last year, the band learned of two famous fans who have shouted them out for their uniquely morose songs: On “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper cited the band as one of her favorite acts from her “depressing, alternative” phase, and an old post from singer-songwriter Zach Bryan noted how deep their songs can cut, especially in the middle of the night.
Mayday Parade’s defining characteristic goes beyond their hard-hitting music. The band’s two decade career is especially notable in a scene riddled with band break-ups and indefinite hiatuses. With each new release, Mayday Parade continues to deliver reliably catchy pop rock songs, maintain an ever-growing base of dedicated fans, and earn recognition for their contributions. In 2024, A Lesson in Romantic’s lead single “Jamie All Over” was certified platinum by the RIAA, representing 1 million sales and streaming units.
This year, in addition to their anniversary tour, Mayday Parade will be gracing the Warped Tour stage for the festival’s own anniversary celebration at both the D.C. and Orlando stops. The band will also return for their third appearance at the nostalgia-driven When We Were Young festival. 2025 is set to be a dizzying year for Mayday Parade, to say the least. Sanders is particularly stoked to celebrate 30 years of Warped Tour. “There’s nothing else like that experience,” he says. “I’m just excited to see a lot of people and hang the same way we used to.”
Eli Ritter*
With so much on the horizon, the band plans to reflect on everything from the past 20 years with a new three-part album. They’ll release the trio of projects, starting off with Sweet, which is out today. But that wasn’t always the plan. As Mayday Parade went into the studio to record their first LP since 2021’s What It Means to Fall Apart, Sanders realized their 20th anniversary was coming up, and it inspired the band to change course. “We just thought, ‘What if we tried to do something bigger and more grand?’” Sanders says. “It’s kind of an experiment and feels like the right time to try something like this.”
Produced by longtime collaborators Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount, Sweet finds Mayday Parade bending their definitive pop rock sound into new shapes. Lead single “By the Way” takes some swooping influence from Third Eye Blind while the thrashing, punkish pace of “4,000 Days Plus The Ones I Don’t” and “Who’s Laughing Now?” are “the most pop punk we’ve ever gone before,” Sanders says. The latter features Knuckle Puck’s Joe Taylor, whose signature bark amps up the track’s anger. “It’s cool to still be finding those things out about your band,” Sanders says of the song. “Like, ‘oh, we can do a full on fun, totally pop punk song and it works.’”
While Sweet unveils new sides of Mayday Parade, it also offers the softer pop rock moments. From the soaring “Toward You” to the wistful “Who We Are,” the band continues to make music with their devoted fans in mind. “Sometimes if you branch out too much, it could be off putting to the point where people are like, ‘Well, you sound different now,’” Bundrick says. After they took an alternative turn with 2015’s Black Lines, Bundrick realized they needed to figure out “how do we go back to what our fans know and love about us, while also being able to incorporate some of these new elements.”
The release of Sweet coincides with the start of Mayday Parade’s 20th anniversary tour, where the band will revisit their entire discography across several U.S. cities. Sanders and his bandmates have been working hard to build a setlist that honors a mix of hits and deep cuts. “We’re trying to put as much as we can into the set to make it a cool special moment,” he says. “The intention is to celebrate the career of the band and try and play a little bit of something from each album,” Sanders adds.
When the lead singer went back and revisited old Mayday Parade sets, he found it “hard not to look at everything and be nostalgic,” he says. “I looked at our 20 years as a band in a way that I never had before.” Sanders explains how the band’s relentless tour schedule over the years never afforded him with enough time to stop and recognize all that Mayday Parade has accomplished: “It has all put it into perspective how much we’ve changed.”
While he, Sanders, and the rest of the band are far from those party-hungry teens, it’s the enduring friendship they built in that first tour van that’s helped them stay together and be able to celebrate 20 years at all. “We all grew up together doing this,” Sanders says. “A lot of times that’s what tears these bands apart is members just not being on the same page and not being able to get along very well,” he adds. But Mayday Parade’s strong ties have helped them stay grateful to get the chance to keep making their childhood dreams a reality. “I started playing music when I was 10 and met Brooks when I was 12. It was our dream, even at that age, to be able to create music.We all appreciate that we still get to do this.”
By tapping back into those memories, Mayday Parade is almost able to conjure the same magic from their initial era as they look ahead. “Who knows how long this is going to last,” Bundrick posits when asked about the future. “When we first started, we had the same feeling. We didn’t know how long this would last, and here we are 20 years later.”
