Comeback Kid: Records Ranked from Worst to First

For years, I straddled the line between pop-punk and metal, never really crossing into the vague and muddy territory of modern hardcore. Sure, there was the odd hardcore band — Agnostic Front or Gorilla Biscuits or Minor Threat, heavy hitters and trendsetters of the genre.

I didn’t jump into hardcore headfirst until I heard Comeback Kid. They were a gateway band for me, blending all of the melody and hooks of my pop-punk roots with the driving, dark sounds of metal. They were (and still are) totally accessible — you didn’t need to have any experience with hardcore to appreciate them, though you appreciate them so much more when you do.

I must’ve heard Broadcasting first, a long, long time ago. The album is a blueprint for CK’s current sound — the gang vocals, the guitar octaves, the classic hardcore chord progressions. The hooks, the relentless drive forward. All led by Andrew Neufeld’s recognizable howl. It doesn’t discount the band’s prior albums, but it does serve as a cohesion of the sound and a foundation they use to build on it going forward. Not their best album, but certainly one that still holds up today.

Since then, Comeback Kid has only gotten better. In a genre where bands frequently collapse after a couple of albums, CK has joined the ranks of stalwarts, continuing to push the genre in exciting directions while maintaining the sound that sets them apart.

Check out what I consider to be the definitive ranking of all six Comeback Kid albums below.

6: Turn It Around

Comeback Kid’s rookie offering is a strong hardcore album. But there’s little more to it than that. It isn’t particularly complex, and there isn’t really anything about the album that sets CK apart from other burgeoning melodic hardcore bands of the period. (Both Blood Brothers’ Burn, Piano Island, Burn and Every Time I Die’s Hot Damn came out in 2003, and they are far more groundbreaking than TIA for contemporary aggressive music. Let’s not forget Rise Against’s Revolutions Per Minute, either.)

TIA has some of the characteristics of a Comeback Kid album — gang vocals, guitar octaves, hardcore breakdowns, and catchy hooks — but it manages to feel a little more formulaic than later albums, more directly influenced by other bands of the time. You can hear the seeds of that distinct Comeback Kid sound, of course. And there’s an energy and magnetism around the music that foretells of the band’s popularity.

All in all, TIA is a good listen, but it isn’t an album I find myself revisiting very often. It’s fair to say TIA may have made more of an impression on me had it been my introductory album to Comeback Kid. But through the lens of the band’s discography, I’m content putting TIA in the sixth spot.

5: Outsider

Nearly two decades into their run as a band, Comeback Kid could’ve easily flubbed their sixth full-length Outsider. Given enough time, a lot of bands lose their edge or become caricatures of their former selves. But Outsider stays true to CK’s style and shows the band continuing to grow.

Outsider is certainly a step forward for CK (and opens a new era on Nuclear Blast, following a long run on the much-maligned Victory Records). Rippers like “Surrender Control” and “Somewhere, Somehow” stay true to the tradition of pummeling listeners until they’re ready for the hook. Overall, Outsider gives you exactly what you want out of a Comeback Kid album.

Agnostic of CK’s discography (hell, agnostic of hardcore as a genre), Outsider is a very good album. I’d even venture to say it’s as good as any of the albums on this list. You could make an argument to put this album in any of the slots following it, could even argue it deserves the number one slot. I ranked it at five because I believe other CK albums are more pivotal. Give it a little time and we may be looking back at Outsider as classic in the catalogue.

4: Broadcasting

Broadcasting represents a pivotal moment in Comeback Kid’s history. It’s Andrew Neufeld’s first outing as Comeback Kid’s frontman following Scott Wade’s departure and boy, does he prove his worth effortlessly. (This wasn’t Neufeld’s first rodeo — he fronted Figure Four in the late nineties and early aughts.)

From the album cover to the songwriting, Broadcasting paints a bleak picture. The moment the guitars kick in on “Defeated,” you can feel the continuation of Wake the Dead. But the tone of the album overall is darker and angrier than its predecessor. Where WTD is sounds a note of active resistance, Broadcasting drips with lament and rage over a world complacent to the horrors of capitalism. The narrator of Broadcasting — an ambitious, sweeping indictment of contemporary society — is all out of hope.

It’s rare that a band comes out of a crucial lineup change stronger than it was before, but Broadcasting proves Comeback Kid is greater than the sum of its parts.

3: Die Knowing

Coming off the comparatively ultra-melodic hooks of Symptoms + Cures, Comeback Kid recorded a pummeling attack in Die Knowing, leveraging bouncy half-time beats more than in past offerings. In fact, the pace of this record is really what sets it apart from previous albums — it feels more measured, in less of a hurry than its predecessors. This slow-down also gives the record a depth of heaviness, anchoring less on hardcore punk than it does on beatdown.

I wouldn’t consider hardcore the most versatile genre. But bands with real lasting power are dynamic, and on Die Knowing, Comeback Kid moves gracefully within the boundaries of the genre. Going into the recording, they had the benefit of a new guitarist in Living with Lions’ and Misery Signals’ Stu Ross. Once again, Comeback Kid turned a lineup change that might shake most bands into an advantage and pumped out another quintessential hardcore album.

Die Knowing may not be the best Comeback Kid album, but it is extremely representative of why the band has staying power. It’s a dynamic record of CK’s history up until that point and one that I frequently revisit.

2: Wake the Dead

It’s very, very hard to rank a Comeback Kid album this high on the list if it doesn’t feature Andrew Neufeld on vocals. But giving it a few more listens, there’s no way you can’t put Wake the Dead in the top two Comeback Kid albums. The CK formula is there: alternating speeds, layered guitar octaves, strong, dark melodies, plenty of hooks, and songwriting that stands alone in the pantheon of 2000s hardcore offerings. But it’s also a blueprint for so many melodic hardcore bands that came after it, from Counterparts to Defeater to Stick to Your Guns.

It isn’t just that this is the first truly good Comeback Kid record; it’s that it’s charged with the angst and energy of a young hardcore band that knows exactly what it wants to do. It is both dark and triumphant, driven forward by hardcore’s characteristic defiant energy. Wake the Dead is magnetic in its angst, its anthems gripping and reminiscent of east coast hardcore like Bane and Shai Hulud.

We should talk about Scott Wade’s vocals for a minute. I recently read a Reddit thread that described Wade as “the perfect hardcore vocalist.” I don’t necessarily agree, but I do see where Wade’s pipes appeal more to hardcore purists, while Neufeld’s rasp has more of a metal flare to it. For a lot of people, Scott Wade’s departure is where the buck stops for the band.

I don’t know that it’s that simple. I will say that while I prefer Neufeld’s vocals, I can’t deny that Wake the Dead is one of the band’s best offerings.

1: Symptoms + Cures

Symptoms + Cures is easily Comeback Kid’s most accessible album. And, to be frank, it feels like a comeback album, though the band only took a very short hiatus in 2007. This was the longest they’d gone without releasing an album in their history, and for whatever reason, they came to the table with something to prove.

The band’s most melodic offering to date, S+C is an album that runs on a track. Every song is an anthem, and the record is perfectly sequenced. It’s a pure hardcore punk album that doubles as a 40-minute singalong. It does justice to the first three albums while forging a path forward that empowered the band to break down walls in later albums.

Coming three years after Broadcasting, S+C’s production quality establishes a sound that is CK’s alone. It sounds like a well-seasoned band playing at volumes so loud they managed to blow out the speakers. That fuzzy-around-the-edges quality gives the songs a raw angst unparalleled on both earlier and later CK albums.

Just as much as CK’s previous albums, S+C serves as a blueprint for the burgeoning melodic hardcore scene, showing younger bands that even when it feels like the walls are closing in, you can at least put a slight dent in them.