Saves The Day have been through a lot over the past two decades: Van accidents, member changes, the emo explosion, and the adventures that carried the act and their fans from adolescence to adulthood. But they’ve never had a proper history of the band… until now. Saves The Day’s ninth album 9 tells the story of the band from the perspective of the band’s founder Chris Conley and does it in a way that’s as exhaustive as it is poetic and makes the listener a part of the songwriting process. From a narrative standpoint, 9 chronicles the epic story of a group of kids from New Jersey who realized their dream and became international sensations. However, on a more existential level, it shows how Conley “woke up” and became aware of his own consciousness through his relationship with music and the unbelievable adventures it inspired since he formed the act in 1997.

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“A lot of the memories that I write about in the lyrics for this album I haven’t written about because they were too painful or complicated. But for some reason when I was writing, my brain kept coming back to thinking about my entire career from a sense of reflection for the first time,” Conley says of the process of writing the follow-up to 2013’s Saves The Day. 9 opens with the upbeat “Saves The Day,” which serves simultaneously as a mission statement and love letter to fans before segueing into “Suzuki,” a song that features the opening line, “On a black and red couch playing a burgundy Les Paul I played on Can’t Slow Down so many years ago, writing album number nine right now.” Then again, this meta sentiment isn’t so surprising coming from someone who famously penned lines like, “You want to know who I really am, well so do I” on the song “See You” from the landmark 2001 album, Stay What You Are.

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From there the album takes you back to the earliest days of the band’s history of playing house shows on the crunchy, riff-driven “Side By Side” and drops you into what it’s like to be to on tour with your best friends when all cylinders are firing on the instantly catchy, psychedelica-tinged “Kerouac & Cassady.” Next we move onto the band’s unplanned rise to stardom and relentless work ethic on the driving and uplifting rocker, “It’s Such A Beautiful World.” “This song is about the Through Being Cool era and things are starting to heat up,” Conley says of the latter track, which sounds like an unholy amalgam between Weezer and glam metal. “At this point we are flying to performances all over the world so in the first stanza I say, ‘If we get stuck on a plane, we’re skydiving to the show.’ It’s such an incredible life to get to live and we were nuts for it and enjoying every second of it.”