Pittsburgh’s own Old Neon is about to blow your minds with the release of their highly anticipated EP Resolution, dropping May 23rd. With production by Matt Brasch and mixing by Nick Steinborn of The Wonder Years, plus mastering by the legendary Will Yip, this EP is a raw, emotionally-charged ride about growth, resilience, and standing tall when everything around you seems to be crumbling. We caught up with Sean Michael (bass/founder) and Mike McInnes (guitar) of the band to dig into their creative journey, the story behind the lead single “Nobody’s Burden,” and where they see themselves fitting into the constantly shifting pop-punk scene.
JG: Your new EP Resolution is about fighting and making things work. Can you talk about a specific moment during the making of the EP where that theme really hit home for the band?
Sean Michael: It was leading up to the EP when we were just creatively coming at it from different perspectives. Things had gotten so deep that we were going to have a meeting. It was on a Sunday morning when we were talking about how we should break up because this isn’t working. Like, everyone was fighting. There were groups of people fighting other people’s ideas. And, it’s like a real pressure cooker when you’re trying to make something that is representative of everyone, but also, like, a step forward for everyone, artistically speaking. And, it was just such a pressure cooker, and we were all collapsing under that pressure.
One morning, we were just like, here is why we should break up. And here is why we shouldn’t break up. Everyone just kinda came clean about our personal issues with each other. I know that I can often be the person in the band who has the most fire and the most blunt pattern of speech when dealing with conflict. I know that was brought up for me. We talked about everything from shared perspective to availability and emotional investment. For whatever reason, we didn’t break up that day. We all left the conversation having aired our grievances and feeling a little better.
Then we immediately had to decide on the songs to go to Matt Brasch with, who produced the record in Philadelphia. And that was a whole other level because even though we’ve been a band for two plus years, we’ve never spent time outside of practice together other than at shows. We’ve never had to cohabitate or exist within each other’s spaces, so that was a litmus test in and of itself. But it ended up being pretty fun, and we made it through. I feel like we did our best work so far. And then hopefully, the next one will be even better.
JG: You worked with some serious pop punk heavyweights, Matt Brasch, Nick Steinborn, and Will Yip. What did each of them bring to the table, and how did those collaborations shape the final sound of the EP?
Mike McInnes: I think with Matt, we were all just kinda blown away by how much effort he put into it, even from the get-go. We were sending him stuff last summer while they were out on tour. And as soon as he got home, he made a ton of videos with suggestions. Don’t play the chords like that. Play it like this. Maybe we should remove this section of the song and bring it in later. Things like that.
And then just getting Matt’s general philosophy on recording, which I’m sure he learned from his band, and he really just imparted all of that to us. He was the most directly involved with everything. And then he and Nick had a shorthand, they told us some stories about when they ran out of studio time on Wonder Years projects and how they divided up the remaining work to go. So there was obviously a shorthand between the two. They knew what they were doing. And then for them to get Will involved to master for us was just really cool and kind of them.
JG: Being around veterans who’ve been in the game for so long, did you pick up on anything that you’ll take with you? Maybe their shorthand or things like that?
Sean Michael: Oh, definitely. Matt was very forthcoming with his knowledge of the industry. And any questions that we asked, he would take a lot of time to answer. He would even go so far as to tell us what to do for next steps and how we should proceed, like, with the release schedule and putting everything out and engaging a PR firm and all that, which was stuff that we hadn’t even considered up until that point. It was more or less just to make a song and put it out. Matt taught us a lot about the touring process and how that works, even financially and how to engage and interact with labels.
Any questions we had, he would just go into detail. When we started working, we were doing like thirteen or fourteen-hour days. And I thought maybe this was just an initial rush for everyone, and everyone’s excited. But we pretty much stuck to that schedule the entire time, and it dawned on me three days in that this is what this dude does. This is his life.
This is what The Wonder Years probably do when they’re making a record. Start at 10 AM and end at 2 AM. And you’re just working all day because that’s the sort of fidelity to perfection you need to create something that is going to sound its highest quality, or at least the highest quality you can make it. Even just watching Matt work was like, oh, this is like how this guy’s life is. It’s not so much that he’s just excited to do this project, or he’s putting a bunch of special effort in. It’s just like, wow, he actually works this hard, and he worked as hard as I could possibly imagine someone working.
Mike McInnes: Yeah. That’s what I said to him. I said, you know, if even one of the other guys in the band is as motivated as you are, it’s no wonder that you’ve had the success you’ve had. We would leave at 11:30 or 12:30 at night, and at 3 in the morning, he would send us the work of the day. Because he stayed there fiddling around with it hours after we’d left.
We’ve always done things ourselves, which allowed us to get things done quickly and especially affordably when we weren’t playing a lot of shows. We didn’t have any sort of income other than us putting our own money into this. And we would do things very piecemeal, where a lot of the actual production almost happened during mixing. We would send very raw guitar files and things like that, and the person mixing it really had a lot of say in how it sounded. And Matt’s point, which in retrospect makes total sense, was that we needed to cut and polish everything pretty close to the finished piece while we were recording or else you won’t know what you have. How do you know what’s missing? We need to add it right now. We need to print it, and that’s the way the track is. There’s no adding echoes or anything later. We’re doing it right now, so we know what it sounds like.
Sean Michael: Matt and Nick have worked in this field professionally. And so they know what producers who make thousands of dollars an hour require and ask of them as artists and other people as artists. We were able to get a sort of cheat code in a way to get that knowledge without having to pay some Hollywood producer thousands of dollars an hour.
JG: Speaking on those thirteen-hour studio days, is it true they were fueled by Coke Zero and Wawa Mac and Cheese?
Sean Michael: For the most part. We don’t have Wawa in Pittsburgh, but it’s a huge thing in Philadelphia. So, we definitely had a lot of mac and cheese and little Italian sandwiches. I had a ton of Coke Zero. I’m sure Mike is more of an energy drink guy.
Mike McInnes: It was seltzer mostly. We went through so many 12 packs of seltzer water. I have one of those in front of me right now. But, yeah, I got a lot of energy drinks too. And then by the time I finished tracking, I didn’t wanna have any alcohol or anything in the house, where if I had to wake up and start recording, I couldn’t say that I don’t feel like it today.
Sean Michael: The thing about eating food like that is it doesn’t always hit you all at once. When I got home from being out there, I was lying in bed, and I was just like, oh, that was catastrophic for my body. I was sicker than I realized I felt because the adrenaline just keeps you going. Once I got home, I was like, that was a horrible mistake.
JG: Switching gears a bit to “Nobody’s Burden.” That’s such an anthem. I love that song. Was there a particular moment or person that inspired the lyrics, or was that more of a collective emotional experience?
Sean Michael: There is a person who inspired the lyrics. It was our singer, Drew’s, friend who had a long-term decade-plus relationship, and then it kind of ended out of nowhere. Just like a blindsiding ending. Drew expected the response from that person to be utter grief, pain and agony, which is what anyone would expect. Instead of that, they said I can sit here and cry myself to sleep every night, but I’m gonna just focus on my purpose and get my life to a place where I can afford to live as a single person and just move forward instead of wallowing.
It was remarkable to hear because I know that if my partner left me out of nowhere after all these years, I would certainly wallow and not think about my drive and purpose. We took that inspiration and put it into a song that Bea (guitarist) had actually written the outline of.
It’s pretty inspiring. It makes you wonder how you would fare in that situation. I don’t think I would fare particularly well, but it’s kinda remarkable that somebody could take stock of themselves so quickly after such a devastating moment.
JG: Definitely. I think if I were in that situation, it wouldn’t go like that at all. It’s such a unique and healthy perspective on dealing with a breakup.
Mike McInnes: Drew went to college out in the Philadelphia area, and this was a friend that he’d met in school. She just happened to be in town again the week we were there, so we got to play her a little bit of the outline of what we had done so far. That was pretty neat.
JG: Pop punk is clearly having a moment again, but with so many voices in the mix, what do you feel sets Old Neon apart in today’s scene?
Sean Michael: I don’t know that we’re necessarily out to reinvent the wheel or anything. I definitely just wanna be a passenger on this interesting highway and landscape of what everyone is doing. You’re right. There are so many great bands in Pittsburgh, even in scenes like Philadelphia that don’t get as much recognition, but they are at least a part of this tapestry.
I think that’s my main goal, and I think maybe you don’t necessarily realize that more is happening while you’re inside the moment. We’re just taking whatever comes and being pleased. And it’s been honestly such an amazing surprise that it’s resonated with so many people. Unlike when we first started, there are rows and rows deep of people just yelling our songs back at us over the music. If we never make another dime out of this business, that’s enough for me because that’s what you want.
That feeling of people knowing your songs and caring enough about them to sing them back to you, that’s what it’s all about. We have people who come to our shows and make us bracelets and hand out bracelets for other people with song lyrics or titles on them. We’ve developed a real sense of community even among the people who have come to our shows or the bands we played with. What more could you want? Especially nowadays, I’m sure everyone kinda knows, there are no new big stars left in the music industry. In my experience, I see it kinda coming back to a more regional thing where a more niche group of people are interested in the exact type of music we’re making.
Mike McInnes: When I first got into making music like this in the early 2000s, everyone was just focused on getting signed and going on Warped Tour and things like that. And now, I think we’re just more worried about making everything we’re doing fun and as good as we can, but also making sure we’re enjoying it while we go and not really trying to do anything because that’s what you need to do to become whatever. We’re finding things that make sense and just having fun on the way.
Sean Michael: I also think hyper-fixating on goals like that can be limiting because your tunnel vision is so aggressive and so refined that your fidelity to that sort of perfection is almost so high that what you end up with is this constant feeling of not achieving x. Like, if your only interest is global super stardom, well, I’ve got news for you, pop punk really isn’t the place to find that. And two, you’re gonna be really sad a lot of the time and miss out on a lot of the shows that are full of people screaming your songs because you won’t be able to enjoy those things when they’re happening in the moment.
Mike McInnes: You’re always worried about the next show. This should have been bigger. The next one needs to be bigger. We need to be playing with this band. That kind of thinking consumed my early twenties. And now, I think the way that we’re approaching this is at least just more fun for me.
JG: How has performing live and sharing stages with bands like Knuckle Puck and The Spill Canvas influenced your approach to songwriting or performance?
Sean Michael: One of the harder things is the moments in between songs, and you don’t necessarily know what to say other than, like, thanks for coming and buy some merch. Sometimes you can look at what more seasoned bands do in those situations and glean something from that. But for the most part, I think it’s kind of a feel thing. If you try to do too much of what other people do on stage, it kinda goes back to that chase of success.
If you try to be too much like Knuckle Puck, then you’re failing to be yourself in some ways. What feels right is what works generally. Then there’s definitely some dialling in from there because you could be trying to skip rope on the stage, and it’s like, oh, this isn’t the vibe. You’re missing some notes when you’re trying to skip rope instead of playing guitar. That’s an extreme example, obviously, but I think everyone refines based on what they feel works in the moment.
The nice thing about it being live is you get instant feedback based on not only your vector of shame and how stupid you feel doing something, but also what the audience thinks or how they feel about it. A lot of our friends and fans, for better or worse, if they didn’t like something or if we didn’t play something they wanted to hear, they’ll let us know. We’re small enough that they have direct access to us. It’s not like Knuckle Puck, where they play the show and then they walk off to the back and no one ever sees them again. We generally play the show, and then we hop off stage and we’re talking to everyone. Generally, if we do something insanely stupid, someone will simply tell us, and then we can correct it.
Mike McInnes: We’ve gotten to play a couple of big festivals the last few years. More than performing, it was interesting just seeing how bands treat people backstage, seeing how they treat the staff. There are bands that I’ve spent a lot of money going to see in the past, where I’ve seen the way they treat the people that they don’t think they need to be nice to, and that just really hurts my enjoyment of what they do. Then you see people who are just so kind and generous. The thing that I’ve taken from it is how I wanna treat people more than how I wanna perform.
Sean Michael: That’s a really great point. We’ve seen, and I can’t obviously mention any names because I don’t wanna get myself in trouble, but we’ve seen some people treat their crew in very demeaning ways. Coming off the stage screaming about their in-ear mix, and it’s just like, come on, man. You just sounded great. The level of cruelty was very high for what seems to us as maybe a small issue. You definitely learn that you don’t wanna ever make someone feel like that. That’s a great point, Mike.
JG: What’s next for Old Neon?
Sean Michael: We have a ton of shows in April and May. In May, we’re gonna do a little weekender from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Newport. And then in October, we have my favourite show of the year, which is our annual drag show. Instead of coming up and lip syncing to a song on the speakers, drag queens will actually come up in front of our band and lip sync to our songs. And that’s a massive Halloween party. This will be the second time we’ve done the drag show. It’ll be the third Halloween party we’ve done. That’s gonna be just an insane, crazy, fun, everyone-invited, everyone-included party.
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