In the pop punk explosion that was the mid-2000s, Motion City Soundtrack developed a niche of their own. Brandishing just the right balance of light and poppy tunes with intelligent and sometimes dark lyrical content, the group rode the moderate success of their first single “The Future Freaks Me Out” into the ears of music fans everywhere. 

Motion City Soundtrack didn’t channel the unhappiness of a Fall Out Boy or Hawthorne Heights, but they didn’t rely on the juvenile silliness of a band like Blink-182 either. If anything, it was their neurosis that fans connected with. 

A dozen years later, Motion City Soundtrack is back with their sixth album, Panic Stations, and show no signs of slowing down just yet. Myspace caught up with Justin Pierre, vocalist and guitarist of the Minnesota-based quintet, to ask him about their latest album, getting older, and whether or not the future really freaked him out. 

You just released Panic Stations in September. How would you sum it up for someone who hasn’t listened to Motion City Soundtrack much over the last decade? 

I think it’s a rocker, which is what we set out to do. It gives off more excitement than (2012’s) Go. That album was great to listen to, but it was harder to perform. There was just something lost in translation. With Panic Stations, we fine-tuned everything live before we got into the studio, which was the opposite of the last record. I love it, but it would suck if I hated it when we just released it.

How has the band changed since entering the scene with I Am the Movie in 2003? 

I think we’ve all developed certain disorders. We’ve worked through issues and grown as people, but we’ve always wanted to play in front of people through all of it. We’ve never been super successful as far as selling albums, but people keep coming to see us live, so we’re doing something right. 

A lot of the bands Motion City Soundtrack came up with 10-12 years ago have already broken up and reunited. What’s been the key to keeping Motion City together for so long? 

I think those bands can come back, but I don’t think we could come back. I look at some of the bands I liked when I was growing up, and they seemed like huge bands. Right now, we’re bigger than they were. It’s weird because this thing that we did for fun became what we do for a living. Personally, I’ll always play music. It may not be heard in the same quantity as it is now, but I’ll always be making it.

Now that you’re more removed from them, what do you think of your older records?

When I think of albums, it’s what they mean to me lyrically. They say where I was in my life. They’re all connected, but they’re also all separate. 

For Go, it was in the middle of a Minnesota winter, I was constantly in pain with my back, and I was trying to write 50 songs at a time. It was the end of one thing, whereas Panic Stations is the beginning of another. Go felt like I was just floating through life. I like hearing it but it was very death-centric, because a lot of people I knew died around that time.

I could go on for a lot longer, but I’ll just say that I Am the Movie is about people living lives oblivious to the chaos they’re committing around them. Commit This to Memory, I was drunk for half of it and sober for the other half. I can tell which songs are which. 

Looking back on it, how accurate was “The Future Freaks Me Out”? Did it really freak you out? Does it still freak you out?

No, when I think about that song, it’s a reference to being scared of the present. If you can’t keep up in the present, the future is really going to fuck you up. At that time, Will & Grace was the most popular TV show, but I never watched it. Now it’s the Big Bang Theory. I just don’t understand popular TV. I’m still 15 years behind with technology. I mean, I still used the term “cellular phone” in that song. I know I’ll never catch up with any of that. But don’t get me wrong, some of it’s cool. It’d be cool to be living on Mars in 1,000 years. I think I’ve learned to handle things a lot better now, or at least I worry a lot less.