When it comes to the pop punk explosion of the mid-'00s, one of the bands that doesn’t get mentioned as often as is deserved is Cartel.
Founded in Georgia in 2003, the US rockers were staples of the scene, performing alongside names such as New Found Glory, Paramore, Panic! At The Disco, and others.
Following the release of their debut EP, The Ransom, in 2004, the band issued their debut album, Chroma, the following year, with widespread acclaim soon following. Appearances on soundtracks, widespread touring (including a few trips to Australia) soon followed, and before long, the record was considered a classic amongst their fanbase.
And rightly so. It's a perfect encapsulation of the new-millennium pop punk sound, filtered through the stellar songwriting and vocal delivery of Will Pugh, while harnessing catchy hooks and slick production that has long resonated.
For Pugh, it's a record which he remains proud of, 20 years later. Growing up on acts such as Genesis and Journey before discovering bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, the Cartel story emerges from a tight-knit musical community just outside of Atlanta, with Pugh and his friends catching acts like New Found Glory in their earliest days.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
Before long, this group of friends had coalesced into a band that began combining their shared influences to craft their own music. "For us, it was like, 'We just want to be a part of that,'" Pugh remembers.
Crafting Chroma, however, feels like one of those things for which the band must surely have been aware they had captured lightning in a bottle during that recording session. After all, you can't be making songs like Honestly, Say Anything (Else), and Save Us without realising things were heading in the right direction.
"We knew that it was pretty special," he remembers. "Obviously it is our debut, so we have a lot of these ideas about how we want to make an album and different things and we're all listening to different music, and we're trying to bring in different influences from the different albums that we're listening to and artists that we're influenced by.
"We were pretty high on the record," he adds. "We felt like it was really great, but I think any band will tell you that, so I don't know if it's necessarily different because I think I've felt that way about every album we've done.
"It's like, 'Oh yeah, this is awesome – we've gotten there.' So the fact that it hit with our first one was just a little lucky. But obviously, looking back through it, that one was special because we didn't know what we didn't know."
The album's release was an impressive undertaking. Issued by now-defunct indie stable The Militia Group, the record sold around 3,000 copies in its first week, and after a few months of steady and relentless touring, that number had jumped tenfold.
Helping bolster sales was an appearance on the Madden NFL 07 video game, which sold over seven million copies in the US in its first year.
By 2007 though, it was time for a new record, and Cartel were given a rather unique opportunity to take part in an Australian creation.
Back in 1999, Paul Curtis, the manager of Brisbane's Regurgitator had hit upon the idea for a novel way to craft a record. The concept was Band In A Bubble, where a band would live in a constantly-monitored plastic bubble, writing and recording a new album in just a manner of weeks.
For the Gurge, that album was 2004's Mish Mash!, recorded in Melbourne's Federation Square. In 2007, the concept that debuted on Channel V was expanded overseas, where MTV adopted it for one sole season. The band in that New York City bubble was Cartel, and that record was their self-titled second release.
As any artist knows, you have a lifetime to write your debut, but rarely are you given three weeks to write your second. As Pugh admits though, everything was definitely hyped up a little bit more for the cameras, admitting it to be something of a "marketing ploy".
"Any band will tell you, you don't just stop writing after you finish any album," he says. "I was like, 'We have a new album coming out in the fall, I've already got seven songs written for the follow up to that.' You're constantly writing as an artist, and I think by the time we had figured out what the bubble thing was going to be, we probably had 11 songs.
"So really that was more of like what it's like to finish an album," he adds. "We had gone in and pre-tracked some things, it wasn't just like, 'Yeah, we're just going to actually write and record this,' and I think that marketing was part of the reason why some of the reception wasn't that great."
Though he admits the experience was a "crazy" one, Pugh also notes that the Band In A Bubble saga was something of an attempt to paint the band as something they weren't.
However, Cartel continued to flourish, and two more records followed, though nothing new has arrived since 2013's Collider. That last point isn't entirely true, though, with the band re-recording their debut for Chroma XX last year.
"We had an issue with Sony, who owned that album," Pugh explains. "Their licensing department is like trying to hit a bullseye in the dark. To try to pin someone down to get the licensing was just getting really difficult.
"Obviously, Taylor Swift had done her thing with Taylor's Version, and we went with our attorney, we're like, 'Yo, can we just rerecord all this stuff?' He was like, 'Yeah, I mean, you're the publisher, you guys wrote it, so you don't need anyone's permission. Cover yourself, which is essentially what you're doing.'"
Indeed, Chroma was an interesting record in that it would occasionally be absent from streaming services due to these licensing issues, and with the band now seeing an opportunity to revisit that album with years of hindsight, a re-recording made sense.
"If you listen to Cycles and then listen to Chroma, those records are four years removed and I think sonically, there were just a lot of different advancements," Pugh notes.
"We also recorded and mixed Chroma in 17 days, so it was just a whirlwind. But I think we could come back to it with a lot more intention and a lot more, like, 'This is how we play it live, this is how these songs have changed.' But for us, listening to Chroma as it was, was almost unrecognisable in some areas."
"Obviously, the sonics and technology has gotten so much better in 20 years that it was just like, 'Let's jump back in here and do it again, and make something that will last another 20 years for people and be a little bit more relevant,'" he explains. "Versus, you know, when we were kids and you listened to The Beatles and you're like, 'This kind of sounds like shit. It's awesome, but sonically it sounds old,' and we didn't want that to be the case with Chroma.
"As we move into the next phase of Cartel, we wanted to update it and make sure that it made sense to people who would listen to it now and who've never heard of us."
This re-recording has brought with it Cartel touring the record for its 20th anniversary, playing it in full. The group are also visiting Australia in February for the Emo Extravaganza tour, performing alongside Anberlin, Hot Chelle Rae, This Wild Life, and Broadside, while also delivering a couple of headline shows.
For the band, it's been 13 years since their last visit, though for Pugh, he's on-ground constantly – most recently performing alongside New Found Glory at the Good Things festival in December.
"It doesn't feel like it's been so long for me," he admits. "I mean, I was just there in December, but for the rest of the guys, it's been forever. Like, it's a completely different thing.
"But we didn't tour, uh, after the [ten-year anniversary] Chroma tour in the States, my wife got pregnant, we had our baby, and she just turned 10 actually this past week. So it's very serendipitous and circular.
"We kind of put it down for a while. We're just like, 'Yeah, there's not really anything left for us to do right now; there's no new music,' and we always felt like there wasn't really a point to being in a band rehashing all your old stuff if you weren't still trying to create something new.
"And that was kind of where we were at. So we didn't break up, we were just like, 'Let's just kind of chill. I don't want to tour with a baby, I want to be able to be home and be around, and then we've all created our own individual lives outside of the band since then."
Pugh also promises that there's new material on the way, with the group's long-awaited fifth album set to arrive later this year.
"Coming back, re-recording [Chroma] and re-releasing it, that whole process kind of got my creative juices flowing again when it came to guitars and like kind of what made sense to be a Cartel song," he notes.
"That in and of itself birthed this new album that I'm insanely excited about. It's just really cool that Chroma is able to do that again."
Tickets to Cartel's upcoming Australian shows are on sale now via Destroy All Lines.
An Emo Extravaganza
Anberlin (Performing Never Take Friendship Personal in full)
Cartel (Performing Chroma in full)
Hot Chelle Rae (Performing Whatever in full)
Broadside
This Wild Life (Performing Clouded in full)
Sunday, February 22nd – 170 Russell, Melbourne, VIC
Saturday, February 28th – Roundhouse, Sydney, NSW
Sunday, March 1st – Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, QLD
Cartel also playing headline shows at:
Monday, February 23rd – Stay Gold, Melbourne, VIC
Wednesday, February 25th – The Gov, Adelaide, SA
Friday, February 27th – Waves, Wollongong, NSW
