Earlier this year, Phoenix band The Format released their first album in almost 20 years. For many fans across the country, “Boycott Heaven” is the first introduction to the band.
But for Phoenix-raised millennials like Josh Chesler, the return of the format is a much bigger deal.
JOSH CHESLER: In the time between The Format’s last two albums, I finished high school, graduated from college, got married, bought a condo, held multiple real jobs and got much worse at skateboarding.
Yet listening to the band’s recently released “Boycott Heaven” serves as a good reminder that no matter how much the world changes, plenty of things stay the same.
Life may be pretty different now compared to the summer after my sophomore year of high school when “Dog Problems” released, but the monsoon season of 2006 also doesn’t feel that far in the past. And just as Sam Means and Nate Ruess weren’t trying to perfectly recreate either of their first two albums on “Boycott Heaven,” we can all try to evolve and push ourselves in a new direction without losing the things that brought us success and made us who we are in the first place.
Maybe that’s too deep of a message to take away from a poppy indie rock album put out by two songwriters more than a quarter-century into their careers, but it also feels like an appropriate reflection on the millennial experience.
As alternative-leaning Phoenix teenagers in the 2000s, we watched The Format go from a beloved homegrown band playing small local venues to opening tours with the biggest names of the era — like Taking Back Sunday, the All-American Rejects and Dashboard Confessional. Much like Jimmy Eat World and the Gin Blossoms before them had done for prior generations of aspiring Arizona musicians, Sam and Nate showed us that a couple of kids from the Valley could make it on the national level.
And of course right when they were all set to take things to the next level, everything came to an abrupt halt. The Format disbanding was the musical equivalent of the 2008 economic crash — both hitting Arizona millennials just as we were all supposed to be figuring out the beginnings of adulthood.
Ruess went on to greater commercial success with the band fun. Means became a band merch mogul with Hello Merch, and the rest of us fans tackled our 20s looking back fondly on the years when The Format were “our” band.
Even The Format’s planned 2020 return fell into the COVID pit, the same way so many millennials were thrown off of our plans of becoming a responsible adult by locking down, losing jobs and living through our umpteenth once-in-a-lifetime tragedy.
Instead, we settled for the contactless delivery of the reissues and rereleases of the nostalgic albums from our youth — at least we did until last fall when The Format returned and announced “Boycott Heaven.”
Maybe “Boycott Heaven” isn’t really an album about Arizona millennials rapidly approaching middle age in an increasingly challenging world. Maybe it’s not our old friends Sam and Nate showing us that if two regular guys can reunite to sell out the Coliseum and headline major venues across America, that we too can reach new heights in our 30s and 40s. But maybe it should be.
Josh Chesler is a writer and musician now based in Southern California.
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