This year’s a special year for A Day to Remember: 2025 marks 20 years since the Floridian rock band released their debut album, And Their Name Was Treason.
So it makes sense that A Day to Remember’s frontman Jeremy McKinnon is in a reflective mood these days. In a new interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ, McKinnon expressed relief that so many fans still care about the band over two decades into their career.
“For us to be a band this late into our career, and people still give a shit? Just that alone is a blessing,” he said. “I actually had a conversation with somebody about this the other day. I was like, ‘Regardless of what people think, if they like [the music] it or not, it’s just cool that people give a shit about what we do.’
“A lot of people don’t have that luxury. Even really talented people, sometimes they aren’t afforded that. They put all the work into something and no one even fucking notices that it’s happened. For us as a unit, we’ve never been tighter.”
To the surprise of those devoted fans, A Day to Remember dropped their latest album, Big Ole Album Vol. 1, out of nowhere last month. And the sudden release wasn’t the only surprising thing about the record: it merges the sound and style of their earlier material with a refreshed perspective on the band they want to be moving forward.
“When we did [2021 album] You’re Welcome, there was a portion of that album that, I would say, was a little more familiar to people,” McKinnon explained to Rolling Stone AU/NZ, “[and] then there was another half that was really new for us. We were trying different things; we just wrote what we were inspired to in the moment, and we saw how people felt about it.
“With that, it created this situation… I’d been chasing this feeling over the years where it was like, ‘How can we do something that feels like the next A Day to Remember record, or the next A Day to Remember batch of songs, that doesn’t feel too expected?’
“It always just felt super ‘expected’ to me, at least, to go after [2009 album] Homesick and slap a breakdown on every song. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to do, and that always makes me want to do something different. People wouldn’t expect it.”
A Day to Remember are in Australia for Knotfest, and McKinnon said “it’s awesome to be back” in the country.
“For a while there, it felt like we were here every summer. We’ve missed it [in Australia], and we hope to be back more often,” he added.
More information about Knotfest Australia is available here.
