Taking Back Sunday

BIOGRAPHY Adam Lazzara vocals
Eddie Reyes guitar
Mark OConnell drum
Matt Rubano bass
Matt Fazzi guitar, vocals
For Taking Back Sunday, the past few years have been as non-stop as the music on their latest album, Louder Now. The New York-based melodic hardcore quintet’s third album was released on April 25, 2006 and skyrocketed to Number Two on Billboard’s Top 200 chart a week later, scanning more than 157,000 copies. Now gold-certified, Louder Now has led to multiple sold out U.S. headlining arena tours, the headlining slot on the international Taste of Chaos tour in Australia, Japan and Europe, and an MTV Video Music award nomination (the MTV2 Viewer’s Choice award) for the album’s first single, “MakeDamnSure,” which received more than three million combined plays on AOL, Yahoo!, Fuse, and YouTube. The band did command performances on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Last Call With Carson Daly, and got to play themselves in an upcoming episode of a favorite show, Degrassi: The Next Generation. Last June, the band scored their third cover of taste-making music monthly Alternative Press, and received effusive reviews from People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Indeed Kerrang! crowned Louder Now as the critics pick for “Album Of The Year!”
Taking Back Sunday finished out 2006 with the December release of Louder Now: Partone — a 90-minute DVD containing up close and personal band stories, behind-the-scenes footage in the studio and on the road, music videos for "MakeDamnSure" and the album’s second single "Liar (It Takes One To Know One)," and no-holds barred clips of the band's performance at the Long Beach Arena. They also celebrated the holiday season’s spirit of giving by creating a card that raised money for various cancer charities.
The band ushered in 2007 with a headlining North American tour, including their first extended visit to Canada. Summer of 2007 brought them back around North America on the famed Projekt Revolution tour, helmed by Linkin Park and starring My Chemical Romance, Placebo, HIM and many other global acts. They were honored to perform at the NYC Giants Stadium location of the global Live Earth event that took place on 7-7-07. They had already begun greening their touring by recycling at venues, requesting organic items on their hospitality riders and even purchasing carbon offsets in the form of wind energy. They routinely thank promoters of their tours by donating tree buds to families in Katrina ravaged parts of the US in their names.
The hubbub surrounding Taking Back Sunday shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s heard Louder Now. The high-octane drumming and blazing syncopated riffs that rain down on its opening track, “What’s It Feel Like to Be a Ghost,” make it clear that these guys meant business when they went into the studio with producer Eric Valentine (Queens Of The Stone Age, Third Eye Blind) to record the follow-up to their 2004 best-selling album Where You Want To Be. Their intention was to bottle the lightning that this powerful band generates whenever they hit the stage. The relentless touring paid off with sold-out headlining arena tours and delirious fan support. Continued participation on the global stage including main stage stints on the UK’s famed Reading and Leeds Carling Weekend and Japan’s enormous Summersonic Festival have also increased their world-wide fan base. Combined, Louder Now, Where You Want to Be and their debut album Tell All Your Friends have scanned more than 2.5 million copies.
The band has remained a staple on both MTV and Fuse; and in 2005, they were tapped to record a theme song for Reed Richards, the lead character in the video game and hit movie Fantastic Four. “Error Operator” appears in the game, on the film’s soundtrack, and in revamped form on Louder Now.
Taking Back Sunday set out to “create something that we considered timeless,” says the band of Louder Now. “We didn’t want something that people would listen to in 10 years and say, ‘That’s from 2006 when all the records sounded like that.’ We wanted people to listen to it in 10 years and say, ‘Hell, yeah, turn that up!’”
The band has currently recruited guitarist and vocalist Matt Fazzi formerly of Facing New York to join the family and are working on their fourth album.
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