Managing expectations was never a problem for PUP. From the very beginning, their dream was to make enough money to keep touring. Now that Sum 41 have unofficially passed them, Canada’s ceremonial pop-punk torch, I’d say their dream is still very much alive and kicking. However, back in 2015, right before PUP blew up, the future JUNO Award winners received a few words of professional advice that could’ve very well killed them.
On the first day of PUP’s 2015 fall tour supporting Modern Baseball, lead singer Stefan Babcock paid a visit to the doctor. Not only had a cyst developed on his left vocal chord, but said cyst had finally ruptured and was now filling with blood. “This dream of being a rock star, or whatever it is you’re doing, it’s over,” Babcock said when recalling his doctor’s diagnosis to DIY Mag. Fortunately, he and his bandmates were wise enough to ignore that order and finished all but one week of the tour. Once his voice was completely shot, they drove home with the title for the best pop-punk album of the decade.
The Dream Is Over turns 10 this year, but I might not have such strong memories of this album if the four steady members of PUP hadn’t failed before. Despite one of the band’s earliest videos taking poetic license over their origin story, guitarist Steve Sladkowski, drummer Zack Mykula and bass player Nestor Chumak have been banging heads together since they were kids. Babcock ran in similar circles around Toronto as the lead guitarist for Stop Drop N Skank.
However, he didn’t join their tight-knit crew until 2010, while enrolled at what’s now Toronto Metropolitan University, after working with Chumak on a song for class. Over the next three years, the foursome attracted enough buzz to sign with local indie Royal Mountain Records, but ditched the name Topanga after Disney announced Girl Meets World. (Much to my chagrin, this is not the last time I’ll mention The Happiest Place on Earth™).
Of all places, the name PUP came courtesy of Babcock’s grandmother, who claimed all this rock ‘n’ roll business was a “pathetic use of potential”. Much to her bemusement, the band wasted no time winning over critics. Whether pop-punk is the best label for them is debatable, but if PUP are a pop-punk band, then they were the best one since the Wonder Years. The infectious choruses already stuck out from the mangier hardcore scruff of their debut. On the strength of their self-titled, Stereogum wisely named them one of 2013’s best new bands. Come 2014, they’d signed a distribution deal in the US with SideOneDummy and received their first unsuccessful nomination for the Polaris Music Prize.
Even when PUP’s prospects were looking up, the band knew not to let the success go to their head. At the time, Babcock worked for Arts & Crafts, though not for much longer. Once better offers started rolling in from the Menzingers, the Hives, Riot Fest and Van’s Warped Tour, everyone in the group quit their jobs on the same day. Once those dates with MOBO finally came around, between 2014 and 2015, they had played roughly 450 shows.
“For us, the dream was to play in a touring band, and we accomplished that, but also, touring the way that we tour, you also realize that it’s maybe not exactly how you expected it to be,” Babcock told Bandcamp the following year, shortly after the release of The Dream Is Over. By naming the album after his doctor’s warning, PUP weren’t waving the white flag so much as a middle finger. “And in that way it’s like, ‘I guess the dream is over, but it’s still the best thing in the world.”
PUP’s dogged determination speaks loudly to why The Dream Is Over holds up so well. Itching to pile back into the tour van, the band opted to record in their home base of Toronto (albeit at three separate studios) with returning producer Dave Schiffman. Maintaining a level of familiarity under a self-imposed deadline created something lethal: a group that was still in peak stage shape, who had nothing to lose and everything to prove.
Over little more than pensive, spotlit strumming, Babcock delivers the record’s opener with such a shit-eating grin that his bandmates are practically fighting back tear-stained laughter. But once the first of many throat-wrenching screams splatters giddily through the speakers, it’s clear that these guys aren’t messing around when spilling their blood and guts into a razor-sharp 30 minutes.
The four-song run that kicks off The Dream Is Over isn’t just the best on any PUP album. It’s better than the first four songs on Smash, Enema of the State, All Killer No Filler and, yes, even Dookie. Like a well-shaken can of Labatt Crystal, “DVP” spills into sloppy, frothing, D-beat debauchery (“Your sister thinks that I’m a freak!”). Puffed up by a nasty, heaving bass tone, “Doubts” throws its weight around the pit while confidently pounding out melodies that are more sticky-sweet than rock candy.
Catch this band live, and it’s even more obvious that Sladkowski stands head and shoulders above the scene’s average guitarist. During “Sleep in the Heat”, he shreds as if his slick-backed hair is on fire, and the only thing that’s preventing him from burning to a crisp is more riffs. Even when “The Coast” drifts in with its desolate chill, like a car crash rolling over the edge of a cliff, the album never loses its reckless momentum. Forget stopping to make amends; PUP rip through “Old Wounds” as if perfectly content on burning bridges.
“You wanna know if I’m still a prick? Well, I am, and you’re not going to change me.”
In fact, The Dream Is Over cruises along at such an enjoyably blistering pace that PUP seem afraid to slow down. “If I came home right now, / What would I find out?” If the sarcastic title wasn’t a dead giveaway, the fact that the band plow into the initially wordless chorus of “My Life Is Over and I Couldn’t Be Happier” suggests they’re well aware of the answer waiting on the other line. “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, Then I Will” sure reads like a confession provoked by too many nights passed out on the floor, even if the band are only half-kidding. However, it wasn’t lost on them that living their dream demanded serious sacrifice.
“We’ve given up careers. We’ve fucked up important relationships in our lives, all for this band”, Babcock told Stereogum in 2017, right after PUP performed at Brooklyn’s since-defunct Northside Festival. Still riding the wake of The Dream Is Over, the group were slotted above the Hotelier and old pal Jeff Rosenstock, whose breakout album hits double digits later this year. “We’re going to stop when we hate each other, and that’s when it’s going to stop. I don’t want anyone else to stop the band.”
In some way, shape or form, all ten songs on The Dream Is Over reckon with the collateral damage of being in a successful band — whether it’s to the psyche, the liver, a girlfriend or pet chameleon. PUP are committed to pushing through the pain, but by the time the album ends, the regrets are creeping up on them. “Pine Point” is the tracklist’s last stop and lone outlier. Rather than sprint past the finish line, the song takes a long, wincing look over the shoulder at a life once lived. That it’s named after a real ghost town casts their shadows of a doubt in an unexpectedly haunting light. “I hope you know what you’re doing, after all”, they shout in unison, like a crew going down with the ship.
When I first heard The Dream Is Over, sometime in the fall of 2016, I was surveying the wreckage left by chasing my own dream. Having worked uninspiring desk jobs post-college, I had applied and been accepted into the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. My girlfriend of three years planned on moving with me to the sunnier, coastal town of Norfolk, Virginia, but I got cold feet and — in a series of unfortunate events that I won’t even try to explain away (here it comes, brace yourself) — broke up with her on my way in an RV to Disney World.
We had met in college, and while I worried that our relationship was born of convenience, my reason for ending it was built on a widely held fallacy: that to become a great writer, one must go it alone. I was alone, alright, but all I had to show for my first year in the program was one unpublished short story, a prescription for antidepressants and mounting credit card debt largely owed to drunken blowouts at karaoke.
It was during my first trying year away at graduate school that I started listening to pop-punk again. As a 1990s baby, Green Day, the Offspring, Blink-182 and Sum 41 were the gods that raised me, but around the time “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” topped TRL, the blog buzz had gotten a hold of my ear, and I had moved on to revering Radiohead and tragically hip indie rockers à la Pavement. My poet friend, future podcast co-host and tenmonthsummer frontman Nishat Ahmed brought me up to speed on pop-punk’s 2010s revival, which, if it hadn’t already, was reaching its peak in 2016.
That year, Boston Manor, Real Friends, Moose Blood, Trophy Eyes, and Trash Boat all released albums that gave me sorely needed enjoyment. Of course, the lyrics could be cringeworthy, but I could still relate. I was in my mid-20s and trying to figure myself out all over again (the main difference from my awkward teenage phase being it was now legal for me to pound Jell-O shots). If nothing else, the bright, bouncing, in-your-face hooks on those albums were easy for me to latch onto when simply leaving my dusty cell of a bedroom was a struggle.
The Dream Is Over was different. This is not a dirty little secret, but PUP have always leaned more punk than pop. Where the genre as a whole is fairly ridiculed for whining or outright toxic behavior, these guys champion a raw and often unflattering honesty. “I don’t give a shit,” Babcock yells in surrender to the relentlessly upbeat jangle of “DVP”. “I just don’t wanna die, and I don’t want to live”. Which was pretty much exactly how I felt on any given day in 2016. I don’t want to overstate the impact that this album had on me. It did not save or even change my life. At the very least, it sure as shit didn’t make me a better writer. Since handing my thesis committee what passed as a sorry excuse for a book, I haven’t written a word of fiction, but The Dream Is Over helped me grin and bear the worst period of my, so far, semi-charmed life.
Whenever my mood was deep in the shitter, I would skip right to “Familiar Patterns”. It’s the heaviest song on The Dream Is Over, the one with a breakdown, where the band nearly let their shortcomings get the best of them. “Following familiar patterns / I’m falling back into ruin.” I, too, had come to an unflattering realization (specifically, that the abrupt nature of my breakup bore an eerie resemblance to my parents’ divorce). However, when considering all the potential ways I might be repeating my father’s mistakes, “Familiar Patterns” could stop me from spiraling.
Herein lies PUP’s superpower. On an album that was inspired by a supposed death sentence, they’re able to turn routine failure into moments of collective triumph. “They used to say don’t quit your day job,” Babcock sneers before the band dish out some feedback of their own. “Well, guess what? I never had one!” Even when engulfed by the song’s full-blown meltdown, PUP made me feel like I could walk through the surrounding flames.
The runaway success of The Dream Is Over ensured PUP were never going back to the grind of your typical nine-to-five. In the same year that saw grand artistic statements from Beyoncé, Frank Ocean and He Who Shall Not Be Named, along with the farewell of David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Radiohead (?), even The New York Times sang the album’s praises during the year-end season. Cracking the charts in Canada and the US bumped the band to headline status in Europe, but following three more years of non-stop touring, their next album did them one better by peaking halfway up the Billboard 200. By most accounts, Morbid Stuff is the pick of PUP’s litter, especially if you’ll entertain my argument that its emotional centerpiece is pop-punk’s equivalent to “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
I didn’t see PUP perform “Scorpion Hill” until 2022, after the band’s next album had already come out. Their show at The NorVa did not disappoint. Instead of taking an encore, more artists should take a page out of PUP’s playbook. However, between changing producers, recording in a Victorian mansion, experimenting with keyboard, horns and programmed drums, and treating the band like a corporation on the verge of bankruptcy, 2022’s The Unraveling of PUPTheBand lost some bite.
Last year’s Who Will Look After the Dogs brought them back to the basics but also left me underwhelmed, though my bone to pick is more with its muzzled production. Neither record is bad by any standard, and PUP have now gotten big enough for Tiny Desk without smoothing down their playful edginess. Regardless of what I think, the band were justified in changing course from the destructive path of The Dream Is Over. Self-deprecation had been awfully good for their bottom line, but while their dreams coming true hadn’t changed them, they had moved into a better headspace.
“I would never write a song like that at this point in my life,” Babcock told Pitchfork about “DVP” while promoting The Unraveling. “Honestly, there’s nothing more unappealing to me than us writing songs about wallowing in self-pity. I think I ditched that early on in our career after realizing that I’m not the victim. Maybe things are going wrong for me because it is my fault.”
With much reflection and the right medication, my life has also taken a turn for the better. I’m in a relationship that has survived multiple moves and career changes. Writing no longer stands in my way as some Herculean task. Pop-punk doesn’t appeal to me as it did ten years ago, but in revisiting The Dream Is Over, the song that I’ve enjoyed the most is one that used to get on my nerves. More than any other, “Can’t Win” speaks to where I was when the album came out. I couldn’t wait to be alone again, and it was only getting worse. I regret what I did to my ex and probably will for my whole life.
However, maybe I was in too deep with my own shit to appreciate its triumphant chorus. Because now, when I hear those gang chants raising a clenched fist over the chest-pounding drums, it’s like PUP could already grasp the success that was coming to them. After all, their dream was far from over.
Will Yarbrough lives in the Philadelphia suburbs. His writing appears in New Noise, Outburn, The Line of Best Fit, Post-Trash, Atwood Magazine and other publications. You can reach him at wyarbrough23@gmail.com or on X at @willyarbrough15.