The same washed, dad-bod solipsism that Campbell and his bandmates have embraced on their seventh studio release partially explains why I hadn’t heard anything from their previous six, including the ones that went Top 20 in the U.S. The Wonder Years are a recent discovery for me, my doors to new-ish rock music having been painted shut decades ago. The question of how much a listener will enjoy the album - which comes out September 23 from Hopeless Records - depends on whether they believe these two categories of angst are equally worthy of such earnest, robustly leather-lunged exploration. The fears Campbell conjures and confronts over the course of 12 harrowingly catchy tracks on The Hum Goes on Forever range from the everyday to the apocalyptic, from shards of glass in the garden to rising coastlines. The song, meanwhile, sounds a bit like “The Boys of Summer” if Don Henley couldn’t rouse himself out of bed in the morning to cruise the boardwalk. “I’m growing out my hair, cuz who gives a shit,” he howls on “Low Tide,” sounding less hedonistic than fatalistic. A certain uptempo, downbeat anxiety is Campbell’s specialty even when he rocks out, you can sense the quiver in his voice, or the lump in his throat. Suffice it to say that this is not an under-wrought collection of songs. The title of that one: “You’re The Reason I Don’t Want the World to End.” In it, the singer’s discovery of children’s gloves in the pockets of his winter coat offers conjoined sensations of solace and terror. Campbell repeats the line about not wanting to die about forty minutes later, during the album’s finale, which is addressed to his two young sons. “I don’t want to die” pleads Dan Campbell on the first track of The Wonder Years’ upcoming The Hum Goes On Forever, a coruscating slow burner called “Doors I Painted Shut.” The phrase evokes a cozy, middle-aged domesticity, albeit with something ominous lurking behind the walls, or maybe in the basement the question is whether you’re shut in or shut out.
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