Boys Life, the long-defunct Kansas City, Missouri, band who helped pioneer Midwest emo in the 1990s, reunited last year to reissue their seminal work on Numero. Now, they’ve announced their first new music in nearly 30 years. Boys Life will release Ordinary Wars, a new four-song EP, on November 21 via Spartan. Check out the lead single “Ordinary War” and its music video below.
“I think about how short life is a lot,” said singer-guitarist Brandon Butler. “I think we buy into a fantasy that America, money, status, time and titles are real. Those things are really just fabrications in the framework of the American psyche. Our government has failed us. Corporate America owns every facet of our lives. We’re all glued to social media. Cheap dopamine hits scrolling by. Your ideas and feelings use to be the only thing someone couldn’t take from you and now they found a way to take those. America is a business and we all work for the company. If one were to fight a war against these fabrications, one would have to start breaking that framework and value system down. The war would be inside each of us. Denying those forces trying to buy our minds and time. We are a part of something much bigger. So it’s not an ordinary war.”
Boys Life formed back in 1993 and released two albums: 1995’s self-titled debut and 1996’s Departures and Landfalls. Butler, guitarist Joe Winkle, bassist John Rejba, and drummer John Anderson bridged the gap between heavier indie rock and more earnest baring emo together in their tight-knit Midwest scene, which included bands like Braid, Christie Front Drive, and others.
Although Boys Life reunited in 2015 for three shows, and again in 2024 for two concerts, they hadn’t written songs together since their original run. Ultimately, the Numero reissues lighted a creative spark within the band, with the quartet heading to local Kansas City studio Weights and Measures Soundlab to record Ordinary Wars in June 2024 with Duane Trower.
