When We Were Seventeen

on the unexpected, and very welcome, return of Cartel

The Song

Title: 17

Artist: Cartel

Album: 17 (single)

Year: 2022

The Story

Arguably the greatest concert lineup I ever saw¹ was a 2005 bill featuring Paramore and Cartel as the openers for The Receiving End of Sirens and Acceptance. 17 years later and it seems impossible that those bands could have possibly toured together, given the way that each of their legends has expanded in the years since.² Each of those bands is among my all-time favorites which made last month’s surprising release of a new Cartel single a legitimate cause for celebration in my house.

Cartel was a lot of things: Marketably pop-punk, indisputably catchy, and that band in the bubble.³ They were also deceptively clever songwriters. In the heyday of the band’s star-making debut, Chroma, the joke was that you could turn any song into a Cartel song by throwing in a diminished seventh chord⁴ but the reality was that Cartel was actually exploring some interesting song constructions underneath their highly polished veneer.

Take “Q” and “A,” the closing tracks of Chroma. Just as their titles suggest, the tracks function in tandem, with each feeling like a necessary part of the other. But more than that, “A” is a fascinating, nearly-ten-minute reflection of the entire album that precedes it, featuring snippets of melodies and progressions that appeared across Chroma. For a pop-punk band, it’s a weirdly prog moment. Obviously, I love it.

Fast forward to 2009’s Cycles, on which album finale “Retrograde” utilizes the album’s name as a theme, essentially cycling through the same progression on repeat, escalating and resetting it over and over to great effect.⁵ And then, years later, the final track of 2013’s vastly underrated⁶ Collider would call back to the album’s best moment—the bridge of “Uninspired”—in its outro. Despite the prejudices of the genre, Cartel wasn’t out there making pop-punk by just wailing on power chords (and diminished sevenths).⁷ The band was thoughtful with their craft, and their songs remain worthy of deep engagement.

In that vein, “17” is fantastic. It’s a song about leaving the past behind, and it also includes everything I want from Cartel in 2022: layer on layer of Will Pugh’s seemingly perfect pitch, drumming that propels the song forward, simple but highly effective guitar riffs and bass lines, and a series of melodies that create an immensely satisfying vibe that I want to live in for hours at a time.⁸

Honestly, I’m still in a state of shock that we got a new Cartel track at all. It even seems like a few more might be on the way, and you can bet that I’ll be there to consume them, even knowing, as “17” is eager to remind me, that “it’s never gonna be the way it was when we were seventeen.”⁹ And that’s okay. It would be impossible to remove nostalgia from the experience of listening to a band I’ve loved for nearly two decades, but with Cartel, that is far from the only reason to keep listening.

I give “17” five out of five stars.

1. Non-festival division.

2. That Paramore was the first act on that bill seems shocking in retrospect, what with their becoming one of the biggest bands in the world in the ensuing years. But at that time, they were upstarts, touring in promotion of All We Know Is Falling, an album whose finale (“My Heart”) has honest-to-god screaming in it. To put that in perspective: This show took place so long ago that, at the time, Paramore was still dabbling in screamo. Paramore. My god. I’ll climb out of my grave for two additional notes from that show: 1) The Receiving End of Sirens absolutely killed it and when Acceptance took the stage as the headliner, vocalist Jason Vena said that Acceptance was lucky to have TREOS opening because, after watching them night in and night out, he was sure they’d be headlining tours of their own in no time. That didn’t quite happen, but it always stuck with me as a great (and well-deserved) moment of band-on-band love. 2) In a fitting bit of numerology, Hayley Williams would turn 17 only a few weeks later.

3. At the time, Band in the Bubble felt unbelievably gimmicky to me. Despite my love of Cartel, I didn’t watch a moment of it and, because of the nature of its recording, I didn’t listen to the resulting album, 2007’s Cartel, for a long time after its release. (Yes, I was a moody, pretentious little shit.) Now, though, I’m actually quite impressed by the whole affair and mildly jealous of the concept. Well, not the being-on-camera-nonstop part, but the locking-yourself-away-and-working-on-a-project-until-it’s-done part. That part sounds like a blast. Oh, and Cartel is actually a lot of fun, too. “Lose It” and “Wasted,” in particular, are absolute jams.

4. It was kind of a good joke? Anyway, here’s the thing: I’m not totally sure that the chord in question was a diminished seventh and, as someone with two small children and a full-time job, there’s a limit to how much research I can do for minor points in a lightly-read newsletter. We’re approaching that limit. When I texted a more musically talented friend familiar with the situation to see if they could confirm that I was thinking of a diminished seventh, they clarified that the chord in question is “the power chord where you move everything down a fret but the pinky stays the same.” That description is, to further quote my source, “the technical jargon for it.” I think we’ve done enough here.

5. That song is a total banger.

6. Admittedly, this is something of a strawman argument. Reviews for Collider were strong at the time of its release, but I’ve never spoken to another human being who’s listened to the whole thing, so it certainly feels underrated in my social sphere.

7. Or thereabouts!

8. As part of writing this post, but also out of personal preference, I have listened to “17” on repeat a lot.

9. Pedantic sidenote: I was 19, not 17, when Chroma came out and I first heard Cartel.