The Get Up Kids' Matt Pryor Is "Sick To Death" Of Emo Hit 'Holiday' But He'll Still Play It

Something To Write Home About, the second album for second-wave emo icons The Get Up Kids, is now 20 years old. “I know that that record means a lot to a lot of people, and there are still things to say about it that people don’t even know,” offers frontman Matt Pryor, 41. "We were very isolated at the time of making it. There was no such thing as social media, no such thing as podcasts. It was a very different time. I absolutely celebrate that, but I don’t really dwell on that.”

The Get Up Kids were, indeed, born in a different time: founded in 1995 in Kansas City. That’s where Pryor grew up, “pretty introverted and a loner”, learning drums and guitar, and obsessively playing other people’s records in his room. His earliest influence? “Hair-metal, and I’m not even kidding,” he laughs. “Guns N’ Roses, Motley Crue – those were the first bands I ever got really into. Through that, it leads you to Metallica, who lead you to the Misfits, who lead you to Bad Religion, who lead you to Fugazi. And it’s all history from there.”

"[Emo] was a term to describe someone who was being whiny, someone who was overly emotional."

Pryor was 19 when The Get Up Kids' first album, Four Minute Mile, came out, and by 20 he was touring full-time. Their split single with Braid, issued alongside their debut LP, cemented The Get Up Kids as definitive figures in Midwestern emo, though the label, then and now, was never something the band wore proudly. “It was always something that was put on us,” Pryor says. “I still don’t understand why anybody would self-identify with that. I still treat it as a derogatory term, which is what it was when we first started. It was a term to describe someone who was being whiny, someone who was overly emotional. I never felt like we were like that. But there’s no real point in fighting it. I never tried to push back, I just tried to ignore it, and not really talk about it. Like, maybe it’ll go away. But it obviously hasn’t.”

There’s no stigma for new bands who’ve embraced the term and cite Get Up Kids as influence. “If there’s a younger band that I’m really, really into, then I find out later they’re a fan of our work, that makes me really, really proud,” Pryor says. “Like: Pup, Tigers Jaw, Modern Baseball, what they seem to be calling ‘fourth-wave emo’ bands now. It feels weird to me to say, ‘These are all the bands I’ve influenced!’ That sounds arrogant to me, but those are some of the bands with which that’s happened.”

Over the years, The Get Up Kids have broken up once, and gone on hiatus another time. Pryor, when feeling “burnt out” from touring, has worked on farms and food trucks. The grind is tough – “It’s long and it’s lonely, it takes you away from your family, it’s a sedentary life, sitting in a car or a van; it’s like you’re a long-haul trucker who gets to be on stage for an hour a night” – but Pryor feels like the band is better at dealing with problems. “You have more life experience, so you have more relationship experience. You don’t fight like teenagers fight, you get into disagreements like fucking grown-ups do,” he says. “It’s still us against the world, that doesn’t change as you get older.”

The Get Up Kids are excited to return to Australia, armed with their sixth LP, and first album in eight years, Problems. “We’ve had a lot of fun times in Australia,” Pryor says. “The first time we came was in 2001, supporting Jebediah all around the country. We were in Australia for a month. We swam in the ocean, went everywhere, met everyone.”

They’ll be bringing a set that merges new with old, Pryor realising that there’s certain songs the band are duty-bound to play every night. “I don’t need to sing Holiday ever again,” he admits. “I don’t like practicing it. I’m sick to death of that song. But the audience gets so excited when we play it, that I feed off their energy, and I love performing it for them.”