Boys Like Girls are coming out of their more than decade-long hiatus and dropping new music this Friday.
Frontman Martin Johnson announced the upcoming single “Blood and Sugar” and teased a new album in a video shared to social media on Tuesday. In the three-minute clip, Johnson speaks to fans while flashbacks of the group on tour and the band today flash across the screen. Boys Like Girls announced their hiatus in 2011 before releasing their final album Crazy World as a group in 2012. Since then, fans who grew up with teenage anthem “The Great Escape” have patiently hoped for a new record.
“I got an interesting relationship with my younger self,” said Johnson while speaking into a studio mic and reading notes from his phone. “For a while, maybe around 2011, singing songs from our first album I wrote at 17 felt like reading a lackluster junior year English paper from the same podium every day. I guess at some point, the songs you wrote in that old attic apartment are no longer yours. They belong to the listener, whose life experience and memories with them become more important than what they were written down in the first place.”
The lead singer, whose written songs for everyone from Ariana Grande to Avril Lavigne, said that although he “retreated the studio and set off on a quest to make music for other people in 2012,” he would “find myself tuckking a new song into a secret playlist.”
He also shared how in 2020, he played an early demo of “Blood and Sugar” for drummer John Keefe and guitarist Gregory James. After Keefe’s approval, Johnson decided to eventually release the track, which he describes as a song about “empty calorie relationships” that are “so delicious” you’re “willing to deal with the crash.”
“It continues to beat you down, yet you keep coming back for more pain almost like you’ve learned to love it. Why this obsession? We’re only skin and bone, humans, just blood and sugar, really,” continued Johnson. “I think everyone has an infatuation with something bad for them. Cigarettes, sports, gambling, porn, internet validation, pills that change the way you feel, buying too many shoes. I know I spend a lot of time trying to fill the empty hole with drugs used to be. I spend most of the time trying to fill that hole with perfection. But in the end, nobody’s perfect. Only blood and sugar. And that I suppose is the inner DNA of the song that pulled us back into the studio together for Boys Like Girls. The song we want to meet you all again with.”
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The new single “Blood and Sugar” releases this Friday, while their currently untitled album is set to arrive in the fall.
