There's been a trend in recent years, for better or for worse, of bands playing seminal (the qualifying factors of such status varies) albums from their back-catalogue in full live. Often enough it's an out-of-the-blue trip down memory lane, or a full retrospective for a new audience, though increasingly such tours seem to be par for the course for bands who survived ten years after the album in question's release, and bands (perhaps low on money, self-esteem or ideas) who didn't survive and instead reformed in one state or another eager to celebrate or capitalise once again.

Being that the early-noughties sparked a new wave of emo- and punk-influenced bands and a broader recognition of their music it serves to reason that, in the early teens of this millennium, their ten-year milestones should roll around with the same frequency that the then upstarts started hitting airwaves and bigger stages a decade ago. "It's coming up on or has been the ten-year anniversary for a lot of really kind of important records in our genre of music: New Found Glory, Taking Back Sunday, Story Of The Year ‐ lots of bands are kind of celebrating this time," confirms Ryan Key, the frontman of Yellowcard, who have just joined the party with the announcement of their plans to celebrate a decade passing since their breakthrough album, Ocean Avenue. It will be released, completely re-recorded as an acoustic album, and performed as such in full on a world tour. A day after our conversation, as if Key made premonitions over the phone from Colorado, Taking Back Sunday announced the release of TAYF10 Acoustic, a film and full live album recorded during the band's Tell All Your Friends tenth anniversary tour last year. "We didn't want to just do a tour, you know," says Key. "We figured we would do that anyways, but we wanted to do something a little more than that for the fans, and we have the capability to do a lot of recording on our own now and that's something that we really enjoy doing so we decided we would just take our time over a few months and put it together and I think it came out awesome."

The band had already ventured into acoustic territory in 2011 when they revisited the then-recently released When You're Through Thinking, Say Yes, the first album they released following a two-year hiatus. "It's something we've been exploring more lately, recording more sit down acoustic stuff, and I think that after doing [WYTT,SY acoustic] when we thought what could we do for Ocean Avenue, I think the hardcore fanbase really enjoyed the fact that we recorded that record and so we thought let's take it to the next level and do another acoustic record but actually do drums and bass and full string section and some of those things that make the record come to life even a little more," says Key.

The 2003 release of Ocean Avenue marked Yellowcard's debut on a major label, and spawned three singles ‐ the title track, Way Away, and Only One ‐ eventually garnering platinum status for sales in excess of a million copies. Undeniably the band's most successful album, Key looks back on its release with pride and awe. "One of the things I love so much about Ocean Avenuewas that it's by far ‐ leaps and bounds and miles or kilometres or whatever you want to say ‐ our most successful record, and I don't think that the internet had that much to do with it. There was no Twitter, there was no Instagram, there wasn't even really a Facebook, I mean, it was 2004, people were getting Facebook but it was just coming off being a college campus only kind of thing. The record grew in a really organic way, based on the music not on the social networking way, and I will always hold that close to my heart and I will always be proud of the record because of how it performed in the pre-internet explosion era."

The acoustic version of Ocean Avenue was produced and mixed by Key and Erich Talaba, the engineer used on all of Yellowcard's records with producer Neal Avron since 2007's Paper Walls. Taking the hands-on approach across a couple of studios in Los Angeles gave Key the opportunity to reflect not only on the success and impact of the album, but on the songs themselves. "It was a lot different performing the songs vocally. Obviously they mean different things now than they did then; there's a lot of discovering, saying to yourself, 'Wow, I can't believe I wrote this at that age', y'know, and some other times I was like, 'Wow, that's really ridiculous that I wrote this', and a lot of 'Oh man, I wish we had done this differently', and a lot of going, 'Wow, remember when we did that? Why have we not done that again or another record?'. A lot of the songs are just actual acoustic renditions of the songs and then a couple of them are re-imagined in a new way that sounds kind of different to the original song. It was cool. The whole process was super fun."

When it came to booking the tour to accompany the acoustic re-release Key says Australia was a no-brainer. The reception they received throughout their September tour last year ‐ their first in five years with the exception of Counter Revolution in 2011 ‐ solidified the band's desire to return as soon as possible. "We hadn't headlined a show in Australia since 2007 and even then we were co-headlining with Sum 41, so it had been a long time since we had come and played our own shows. Not many people had come to a Yellowcard show and bought a T-shirt in god knows how long ‐ in Australia it was just a really positively overwhelming experience for us; it was pretty emotional, to be honest," Key admits. "We were just blown away, like how our band hadn't been here in six years but it's not a novelty, these people are here because they love our band and they love our music and we could feel that it wasn't like, 'Oh cool, Yellowcard's coming back and I liked them back then so I'm gonna come see them now'; it was the same vibe if not even more intense than it was before. That's why that tour was so special for us ‐ it was somewhere that we hadn't been in a long time and we got a response that, I dunno, I guess I didn't know what were expecting, but we got more, definitely more than we were expecting."