Picture this: it’s 2005, The Academy Is… has just released their debut album Almost Here, making a splash in the emo and pop-punk scene while growing their own loyal fan base. Life is good.
After the release of Santi (2007) and Fast Times At Miracle High (2008), the band would ultimately call it splits in 2011, leaving their discography and the success of the band in the mid-2000s to go their own separate ways.
Between their inception in 2003 and 2026, The Academy Is… would go through a two-decade long journey of breaks and reunions, playing an occasional festival here and there, but never releasing a full project. Following their breakup, things remained quiet until their first reunion at Riot Fest (2015) for their 10-year anniversary celebration of Almost Here. Afterwards, the band stood idle once again. Since 2022, the group has played a slew of festival gigs and opening slots, which left fans uncertain which direction the band was heading in—or even if they had a future.
With an emo resurgence underway in recent years, the band celebrated the 20th anniversary of Almost Here last winter. This 14-date tour was a success, selling out several shows and exciting their audiences with a couple new tracks included on the setlist. The band had some tricks up their sleeve, and it wasn’t just more shows.
It wasn’t until this year that they would truly reunite their spark. The band’s newest album, Almost There, produced by Snow Ellet, marked their first album released in 18 years—and for lead singer William Beckett, being on stage again for the first time in years with the band reignited the spark. “A lot of times, [reunion performances] can feel forced,” Beckett says on a video chat with Melodic Magazine in mid-March. “And if it did feel forced, I wouldn’t want to go ahead and make an album together.”
Getting a taste of the life that once consumed him for so many years reopened the door to a reunion and the possibility of creating new music together. Beckett, who described his time in the band as “fleeting memory that kind of follows you around,” says that his passion for music and the memories from his days with The Academy Is… never truly faded.
Nearly 18 years in the making, the magic of Almost There‘s creation process truly started when guitarist Mike Carden came to Beckett with a few ideas for new material which he says “opened up the floodgates” for his creativity. “Everything just came pouring back from a songwriting standpoint,” Beckett says. Ideas were traded back and forth between the two and Carden flew to Chicago, where they started making music together.
However, there were some mental blocks Beckett had to overcome while diving into this process after all those years in between albums. “In many ways, for us and for me, it took me a minute to kind of unlock my confidence box again,” Beckett says. “When you step away from it, you’re just not sure. I’m always writing ideas and things like that, but as far as actualizing with Mike again, it had been so long.”
As Beckett and Carden got deeper into the collaboration process, it started to feel like it did when they wrote Almost Here back in the early aughts. “Everything just clicked and we were communicating on a level that allowed us to create something as special as Almost Here,” Beckett says. “So in that kind of headspace, it was just like ‘okay, now we can go in guns blazing.'”
Around the time Beckett and Carden wrote their third song together, they thought about the possibility of these songs going beyond the space they created them in. They both realized that the quality of the songs were too good to just keep to themselves…
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