"ENEMY OF THE WORLD" 10 YEARS LATER

Worcester, Massachusetts quartet Four Year Strong’s second full-length record, Enemy of the World hits it’s tenth anniversary this year and still holds as much punch now as it did in 2010. The album opens with a song that anyone that has seen Four Year Strong live in the last ten years is familiar with, “It Must Really Suck To Be Four Year Strong Right Now”. Dan O’Connor, guitarist and one of the frontmen of the band, was quoted in 2010 in an interview with The Aquarian as saying, “The song title actually, AP Magazine did a review of the new Set Your Goals record, they’re friends of ours, and at the bottom of their review it said, ‘It must really suck to be Four Year Strong right now.’ So we had to name a song out of that.”

This track still gets a crowd fired up as soon as frontmen and guitarists, Alan Day and Dan O’Connor, start the introduction. Every song on this album, even arguably slower ones like “One Step At A Time”, still run you over like a train both on the record and live. On a given set, the band usually plays more than several songs off this record in a set list including the fan favorite closer, “Wasting Time (Eternal Summer)”. The breakdown in the middle of the song still explodes. The fact that so many of these songs remain on set lists in 2020 show how they stand the test of time and love from the diehard fans. 

This album is important to me and a lot of people because it continued to show what Four Year Strong is known for best, breakdowns and big pop punk choruses.  But along with big sing along choruses, they also have the lyrics to back it up. A song that occasionally makes set lists, but is a staple at the yearly holiday show, “One Step At A Time”, is about losing a loved one around the holidays. It being played around then makes it that much more intense, and although there are usually pits and crowdsurfing during this song, there is always a fair amount of emotion. 

Some of the songs that are lesser known such as “Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride”, “Nineteen with Neck Tatz”. and “Flannel is the Color of My Enemy” do not make set lists often, but if they did they would carry just as much power. In fact, to date according to setlist.fm, the aforementioned songs have been only played 8, 11 and 2 times live, respectively. Those are some of my favorites, so I would love to see any or all of them make set lists in the future. 

“Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride” is said to be about a feud with A Day to Remember (ADTR), although it was never confirmed, with the response being “2nd Sucks”. The lyrics that suggest it is about ADTR are in the chorus with, “you could get knocked back underground, take one step have you got it in you?” This could be said as a reference to “Holding it Down For The Underground”. There aren’t feisty lyrics like that any longer because there are not these huge fights between bands like there used to be. Not that this feud was on the level of Escape the Fate and Ronnie Radke, or My Chemical Romance and The Used, but it’s fun to think of this song as a time capsule. 
The special edition of the album also contains a song called “Bad News Bears” which is billed as a B-side, but it is just as much of a banger as the rest of the record. The biggest songs of the record remain, “What the Hell Is A Gigawatt”, “Wasting Time (Eternal Summer)”, “Find My Way Back”, “Tonight We Feel Alive (On A Saturday Night)”, and “It Must Really Suck To Be Four Year Strong Right Now”. Maybe with the rest of the upcoming year there will be a playing of the album from top to bottom like there was in 2017 for the debut record Rise or Die Trying.