“How quickly we rot back into the earth and start over.” So go the final lines of Algernon Cadwallder’s 2008 debut album Some Kind Of Cadwallader. The Pennsylvania emo band would release just two studio albums before disbanding in 2012, a mere seven years after their formation. At least their initial run was longer than that of their primary influence, Cap’n Jazz, the Illinois punks who went uncelebrated until after their members earned later notoriety as members of American Football, the Promise Ring, and Joan Of Arc. Algernon’s members, too, would continue in various other projects, but internet word-of-mouth cemented their origin story. In 2018, Algernon Cadwallader reissued their catalog after years of it only being available on Bandcamp or niche corners of YouTube. Then, in 2022, the unimaginable happened: They went on a reunion tour. Call that aforementioned lyric a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever, but judging by the way Peter Helmis speaks about his writing process now, he probably just thought those words sounded cool.

“When I started writing, this was just the stuff that was coming out,” Helmis tells me matter-of-factly of the excellent Trying Not To Have A Thought. Out today, it’s Algernon Cadwallader’s first album in 14 years and a return to their founding lineup: Helmis, drummer Nick Tazza, and guitarists Joe Reinhart and Colin Mahoney. The quartet wasn’t necessarily expecting to record new music when they announced the reunion tour, but those shows indicated a flame yet to die out. Suddenly, Algernon’s chemistry and slow-burning significance was prominent not just to the young fans who showed up to the gig in droves, but to the band itself, who’d wind up performing at Las Vegas’ inaugural Best Friends Forever Festival in 2024 the same evening as — you guessed it — Cap’n Jazz.

But don’t mistake Algernon’s hiatus for inactivity. Following their 2011 sophomore album Parrot Flies, Helmis, Reinhart, and Tazza went on to form Dogs On Acid, meanwhile Helmis began another project called Yankee Bluff. Reinhart joined the emo-folk legends Hop Along and has since resided as an in-demand producer at his own Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, working on albums like Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again that’d become contemporary classics.

But after Algernon — now a bicoastal band of sorts, as Helmis relocated to Portland, Oregon in early 2020 — finally acquiesced to an opportunity to reunite, it wasn’t long before they felt that familiar itch. “We were like, ‘We remember how to be in a band, so let’s just be a band,'” Reinhart tells me. Prophesied or otherwise, Trying Not To Have A Thought was a no-brainer and is far from your mother’s reunion album. Those who previously delighted in Algernon’s black-comedy whimsy will still find lots of witty one-liners and self-deprecating wordplay, but that snark is seamlessly woven into real-world tragedy, such as the 1985 MOVE bombing that killed 11 Philadelphians and left 250 homeless. “I hate the USA in particular on performative holidays,” Helmis screeches on “Revelation 420,” a mathy ripper just as playfully scrappy as its title implies, before proclaiming his mobilizing rally cry: “My hands are megaphones pointed at the sky.” It’s exactly the type of record you’d hope Algernon Cadwallader would make in 2025.

I spoke with Helmis and Reinhart over Zoom from their homes in Portland and Philly, respectively, about their reunion and new album. Read our conversation, edited for clarity, below.

What was the moment when you decided to reunite?

PETER HELMIS: Our friend Curtis asked us to play the Fest down in Gainesville, Florida. We pretty much just gave him the standard, “Oh, that’s nice, but we’re not really doing that” answer that we’d been giving everybody. He just laid it on extra thick, telling us it was our time to come back, it was going to be awesome, it was going to be his 40th birthday — he threw that in there, too. So we’re like, we couldn’t disappoint you on your 40th birthday. And then from there, we knew that if we were going to bother getting back together and re-learning all the songs, we didn’t want to just do one show. So then we planned the tour. And also, I think being halfway through the pandemic gave us some perspective. Like, “If we ever want to do it, we should get on that and do it now.”

When did the idea of making new music together start coming up?

JOE REINHART: It would have been shortly after the tour. We were like, “Wow, that was fun. I’d love to keep doing that. But we can’t keep doing exactly that.” And in the interim, we’d been having fun just sort of jamming while we were rehearsing for the reunion tour. There was a little bit of magic to us straight up being in a room fucking around with our instruments. We were like, “Oh, there’s something to that! But no time for that now. Let’s re-learn these songs.” But afterwards, it was kind of like, “Well, that was awesome. How do we keep doing this?”

HELMIS: We didn’t want to just be a reunion band after that, just playing old songs. We thought that might be kind of cheesy and that maybe we wouldn’t be doing it for the right reasons. Since we were always in bands in the interim period, we didn’t just want to play stuff that was, like, 15 years old. So we were pretty open to the idea once it came up.

Working in your other projects — and Joe, with you working as a producer for so many other bands in the studio — did you ever have moments where you were working on something that was unrelated to Algernon, and then realized, “Oh, shit, this feels like an Algernon song”?

REINHART: I pretty much stole everything on the new record from bands I’ve worked with in the last 10 years. And then also, there was almost the reverse, where I realized how much playing music with these guys since high school up through Dogs On Acid had really shaped how I think about music, the decisions I make, and what I tend to gravitate towards. It’s very much ingrained in me from having spent so much time making music with these guys. So some of that definitely trickled into working with other bands, for sure, because it’s just a part of how I hear things.

HELMIS: I can’t do what I do in Algernon with any other band. Something about being with these guys, it just sort of comes out of me like that, but when I play music with other people it sounds completely different. I think if I tried to make those other projects sound like Algernon, I’d be forcing it, and it just wouldn’t be right. We’re this particular group of people who are really adept at responding to each other with the appropriate response musically or energetically. I feel like that’s our strong suit, you know?

I don’t know how much you’ve picked up on this, but I feel like that 14-year span between albums was just enough time that I’m starting to see newer bands pop up that remind me a lot of Algernon.

REINHART: Well, we didn’t write the book. We just copied it and spelled things wrong.

HELMIS: Yeah, I don’t think we have any room to complain there. I do agree with you, though. When we started playing music together, I bet people listening to us from the generation before could definitely tell the bands that we were listening to and thinking about. Hearing some of the bands from the generation after us, I can pick out little parts where I’m like, “Oh, they probably listen to us a little bit.” I don’t feel bad about it at all. It’s cool that it happens.

You’ve mentioned before that you didn’t feel a ton of pressure with this new album because of your existing legacy, not in spite of it. What made you feel confident that people would resonate with the new music, and that putting it out would be a good experience for you?

HELMIS: I think we really gauge that on what we were hearing of ourselves. Like, we’ve always written music that pleases us and that we would want to hear. If you told me, like, five years ago that we were going to get back together and write a record, I’d be like, “Oh, I know how that’s going to go. We’re going to write stuff that’s interesting to us.” Otherwise, we’re just not motivated, you know? And once we hit that mark, there doesn’t need to be any confidence that it’s going to be received well. We did exactly what we set out to do, and so we’re satisfied. We’re lucky to have that legacy, and it does mean that people are interested in hearing us. But to me, it doesn’t really dictate what we’re supposed to do or how we’re supposed to sound. We might write a ska record next. Who knows?

Were you writing the new album specifically with live shows in mind?

REINHART: I think we’re just thinking about what will be fun to play, regardless of who or how many people are watching and how they’re reacting to it. Like Pete said earlier, if we can impress ourselves, that’s really as far as we think about it. After that, yes, we hope people like it and they’ll let us keep doing this, but that’s about as much thought as we put into that part of it.

HELMIS: But I’ve also heard you say, Joe, from your engineer standpoint, hearing the songs our 20-year-old selves wrote now being played in fucking huge rooms made you somewhat conscious of the space between instruments and stuff like that.

REINHART: Yeah, definitely. And I think that there’s a lot of this on the record. Pete and Nick as a rhythm section leaves so much room for Colin and I to just be nuts. It really wouldn’t work under any other circumstances. But in a big, cool club or something, it translates really well, because there’s these massive booms of low end with a space in between them, and it lets all the other pieces of the puzzle just sort of fit inside of itself.

HELMIS: I remember it sounding much different to play the old songs on the reunion tour in these giant rooms, as opposed to these extremely packed basements where I feel like people probably couldn’t hear anything anyway. We might have become a little bit better of musicians in the past 14 years, too, but I can’t say that for a fact.

I was really pleasantly surprised with the balance you struck on the new record — it’ll make old fans happy, but it doesn’t sound like you’re trying to make another Some Kind Of Cadwallader.

HELMIS: I think we kind of felt the same way, and we were stoked about the fact that it just sort of came out like that. When we started writing new stuff, we were trying to keep it under wraps, but our close friends were asking how it was sounding and stuff like that. And I was like, “It kind of sounds like if we had never stopped being a band and maybe made a few other albums in between.” Either way, I feel like it sounds like what would naturally come 14 years after Parrot Flies.

Lyrically, this album feels more concrete and direct than the old ones, which could get a little absurdist sometimes. I think it’s obvious why y’all felt compelled to get more political here, but I’m curious how the lyric writing process has evolved.

HELMIS: You’re spot on with there being a difference between the lyric writing from back then and now. Like, when we started Algernon, I knew that I didn’t want to sing from the first person, or a similar perspective to mine. It felt like such a communal project that I didn’t want to shift it by making the lyrics first-person directional. So that’s why I wanted them to be up to interpretation and kind of oddball and weird. But for this album, I didn’t know what I was going to write about before I started writing. Lyrics and vocals pretty much always come last for us. I’d maybe given it, like, one second of thought, before I just went, “Yeah, fuck it. I don’t care. We’re just gonna throw it on top.” I kind of think it’s more interesting when the lyrics or message doesn’t really match with the feel of the music all the time. I think the band was stoked to hear what was coming out, too, and that this is the stuff we’d be singing about.

REINHART: I’d always get excited every time he’d text me something he was working on.

I appreciate and admire your ability to write so impulsively without overthinking it. Couldn’t be me.

HELMIS: First thought, best thought, you know? I kind of treat the vocals as a fun challenge for myself to make them sound interesting to me, the same way we want our music to sound interesting to us. We really don’t stop working on a song until we’re like, “OK, that’s as cool as it can be to us.” I’ll just try spewing stuff and then pick the best part — like, “Oh, that’s the bar. That sounds sick right there.” And then if anything falls short of that, I just keep trying different things. I think I really appreciate juxtaposition in music, like a real happy-sounding song that’s about something super serious, or vice versa. So I try to think less about what the lyrics are like and more about just doing interesting vocals with a good melody. Like, I fucking love pop music, so I’m honestly trying to throw a little bit of crazy, fucked-up pop sensibility in some of the vocals. When I get to shout something kind of fucked up over the most bubblegummy pop hook that you can’t get out of your head, that’s the pinnacle for me.

That juxtaposition — is there a standout moment like that for you on the new album?

HELMIS: Um, that’s a good question. Joe, what do I sing about?

REINHART I think my favorite, vocally and maybe lyrically, might be “Shameless Faces.” A lot of very powerful lines sung with very interesting, catchy melodies, sung or screamed. It just really cuts for me, that one.

HELMIS: I’ll tell you a story. When I was writing the lyrics for “What’s Mine,” I was demoing them in our spare room here, which is the closest room to our neighbor’s house. Our neighbor’s elderly mother lives there, too, and she’s like an 85-year-old chainsmoker. Always smoking, always out there, hovering around our house. I was singing this line about smoking outside — “I’m smoking outside, exhaling my whole life” — which has nothing to do with her, but is an odd coincidence. And then my neighbor asked me one day, “Were you yelling at my mom about smoking or something?” I was like, dude, are you serious?

Who knew she’s the only person on earth who chainsmokes outside?!

HELMIS: I’m already so self-conscious about even my partner hearing me put down vocals. Now my damn neighbor thinks I’m yelling at his elderly mother.

One lyric I really liked was “concentration is harder on the art than it is on the artist.” I would love to hear more more about that.

HELMIS: I feel like that’s a classic Algernon lyric. That song is an ode to one of my favorite artistic processes, which is procrastinating. I personally like to procrastinate with other art projects. I think most artists can relate — when you’re doing nothing but working on this one thing in a particular craft, the creativity gets stale. You get diminished returns after at a certain point. So that lyric was just about putting too much focus in one place. Like, to me, like the most creative things happen when you’re not paying attention to anything, and then knowing how to recognize those creative sparks and capture them at that moment and then bring them back to the process. So that’s how I use procrastination. If I’m stuck on something musically, I’m like, “Well, I got a painting over here I’m going to work on,” and then while all that’s happening, something else would come to me musically.

That’s interesting that you say that, because my initial interpretation of that line was from the perspective of the consumer of the art trying to derive meaning from it.

HELMIS: And that’s why leaving lyrics up to interpretation is great. That’s so much better than what I said.

You cite some real-world events on this album, like the 1985 MOVE bombing, and then on “Million Dollars” you reference the homelessness crisis. Can you tell me a bit more about that one?

HELMIS: Over the pandemic I got involved volunteering with mutual aid stuff here, and it changed my whole perspective on homelessness and what cities do to to help or prevent that. Mutual aid is such a cool thing — like, solidarity, not charity. It’s cutting out any sort of middleman. Once you start going out there and meeting different types of people, you remember that they’re actually not any fucking different than you. They’ve maybe had a rough life, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be fucking shit on. It’s the opposite.

So “Million Dollars” was about a project here in Portland where they spent, like, literally a million dollars on these giant anti-homelessness rocks to put under the highway overpasses so that people wouldn’t camp there. It’s such a stark picture of how that approach to homelessness doesn’t help anything, because there are still people camping, just right next to the bridge and these rocks now. Like, oh, cool, that’s what you accomplished with a million taxpayer dollars. Can you imagine the shit they can do with a million bucks? They could’ve just built houses. It’s insane. So that was my way to broach the whole topic by just pointing out this one obvious huge fucking disaster of a fake solution to this problem. I see them as scams, honestly.

There’s this company that that sweeps the homeless camps all over town. Like, seven days a week, driving around in these box trucks, just kicking people out from where their tents are, taking all their stuff, throwing it in the truck. Then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, you can come down to our warehouse and get it.” But the warehouse is like 10 or 20 miles away. Like, how are people supposed to get there? They’re spending billions of dollars on this company. It’s totally fucked up. We just wanted to have “Million Dollars” be a song that just kind of throws these people under the fucking bus.

You call out someone named Frank on that song. Who’s Frank?

HELMIS: That’s the royal Frank. Actually, I can’t really remember if I had someone in mind or if that name just felt good to shout.

Going back to the music — it was cool to hear you employ what I think of as classic Algernon guitar parts on this record. Joe, do those flow out kind of naturally for you too?

REINHART: Well, I think that’s sort of the byproduct of Colin and I playing together. Even when Colin wasn’t around, that sort of middle-era Algernon, I felt like everything I was doing was trying to create things as if he was there. Now that he is there, we just enjoy playing that way. He’s really good at it, and I just mostly try to keep up with him, like, “All right, we’re doing this crazy thing. I’ll spend all week trying to think of something to play to this.” And then, like Pete said, refining it so that I’m entertaining myself as much as I can.

HELMIS: By “entertaining myself,” I think he means “trying to play the hardest thing humanly possible.” Watching Joe play is insane, the way he stretches across the neck to get these riffs. I’m like, why would you ever do that? And he can do it when he’s crowdsurfing, too.

It sounds like, from the reunion tour to making the new album, the entire Algernon comeback played out pretty seamlessly. Is that a correct assessment?

HELMIS: I mean, there was a lot of tricky planning and scheduling going on, especially with us being across the country from each other and stuff. But I think there was also something to that, too; since we had to really plan the reunion, we all had to be all-in, and that actually probably gave it a more special energy than if we were all still in Philly and taking our time together for granted.

REINHART: And in those moments when we were together, it was really fun.

Trying Not To Have A Thought is out now via Saddle Creek.