SCRANTON — For five years, Scranton natives The Menzingers have ventured back home for their annual NEPA Holiday Show. This year it’s Christmas in June, as the four-piece returns to the Electric City June 18 to play The Vault Tap & Kitchen’s outdoor summer series. Band guitarist/vocalist Tom May said to expect a long, headliner-length set from the group — and maybe a surprise from their recently-finished fifth studio album, “After the Party.”
“We recorded it at Studio 4 in Conshohocken with Will Yip,” May said. “We worked for longer on this album than any other album and I think it’s a more well-rounded and mature and older approach. I’ve never been excited about something like I’m excited about this album.”
The Menzingers will be joined by Epitaph Records’ The Sidekicks. Steve Ciolek, guitarist and singer for the Ohio band, said this will be the group’s first Northeastern Pennsylvania date since a 2011 performance at defunct Wilkes-Barre venue Cafe Metropolis. The bulk of The Sidekicks’ set list will consist of songs from their latest album, 2015’s “Runners in the Nerved World,” but Ciolek said the quartet expects to record new material soon.
“I’ve been writing a bunch of new songs and we’ve been working them out with the band lately and pretty much trying to work on writing the next record over the course of the summer,” Ciolek said. “We don’t have any plans to record just yet, but that’s, like, the goal right now, just trying to get the songs together.”
Later this summer, The Menzingers will go on tour alongside Connecticut band Sorority Noise in support of Queens, New York’s Bayside. The routing takes them across the United States and into Canada, but May said the tour will be “laid back and a lot of fun” since he and his band mates won’t have to worry about delivering a headlining set every night.
May, fellow guitarist/vocalist Greg Barnett, bassist Eric Keen and drummer Joe Godino have toured on and off since the release of their 2007 debut “A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology.” Those experiences, along with their encroaching 30s, heavily influenced The Menzingers during the writing sessions for their fifth album.
“We usually try to write what we know from what’s going on in our lives and what’s going on in the world and we’re at a point now where we’re kind of ending our 20s, getting into our 30s and we just wanted to draw on that and the wild ride that it’s been,” May said.