Bouncing Souls turn fans' stories into instant classic new album 'Ten Stories High'

After nearly 35 years of blue collar, we’re-all-in-this-together punk rock glory, the Bouncing Souls have a lot of stories. It turns out their fans do, too.

On Friday, March 24, the Asbury Park-based band releases “Ten Stories High,” a collection of songs inspired by the stories of the band’s true believers.

“We (have) 12 records of digging inside ourselves, thinking about ourselves, a lot of very self-centric (work). And that’s been great, soul-searching and finding things deep inside and sharing them and realizing everybody else has these feelings,” said bassist Bryan Kienlen. “And we created a community, in a sense, by doing that.”

“Ten Stories High,” however, is something different.

“This more directly is not about us,” Kienlen said. “(We’re asking,) ‘What’s your story? We’re listening.’ It’s more interesting, listening to other people’s stories at this point in my life.”

The album was born out of lockdown-era necessity to stay active and keep creating, even if it had to happen remotely. The band’s four members live in three different states, with only Kienlen and guitarist Pete Steinkopf still in Monmouth County.

The group joined the Patreon crowd-funding platform, and one membership tier got supporters a custom song. There were weekly Zoom chats with fans, which singer Greg Attonito would turn into lyrics, Kienlen and Steinkopf would write the music, then send a demo to drummer George Rebelo.

The songs came together quickly because they had to. Kienlen, for one, is a father to two toddlers, the proprietor of Anchors Aweigh Tattoo in Bradley Beach, and plays with Steinkopf in a second band, the East Coast hardcore supergroup Beach Rats.

But that intimacy and speed resulted in some fantastic music. Reunited with producer Will Yip, “Ten Stories High” continues the momentum and old school urgency found on the band’s Yip-produced 30th anniversary EP, “Crucial Moments,” in 2019.

“ ‘Ten Stories High,’ to me it picks up where ‘Crucial Moments’ (left off) ... ,” said Kienlen. “Every song’s better and every song sounds better."

While “Ten Stories High” is, structurally speaking, largely a collection of one-off songs then compiled into album form — akin to 1994’s “The Good, The Bad and The Argyle” and 2010’s “Ghosts on the Boardwalk” — the album is a remarkably strong listen.

Here, the Souls do what they do best: They take the incredibly personal and make it sing-along universal. When Attonito sings “funny how I found myself back then when I was busy trying to be someone else” on “True Believer” radio, or when you listen to the ode to dearly departed buddies “Vin and Casey,” who among us isn’t reminded of our hopelessly romantic times gone by?

The album’s eight fan stories are introduced with a pair of new songs direct from the Souls’ wheelhouse. The title track serves as a mission statement of sorts, then “Back to Better” seems to complete a trilogy with “Up to Us” from the 2016 “Simplicity” LP and the 2020 single “World on Fire.”

Taken together, the three songs released across seven years send a very clear, very Souls message: Things are scary out there right now, and the only people who can make the world better are us — and it takes all of us.

As Kienlen puts it, “That’s just us being us.”

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: New Bouncing Souls Ten Stories High album created by fans