The All-American Rejects released their long-awaited fourth studio album Monday titled “Kids in the Street.”
The 11-track album ends the Rejects’ four-year musical sabbatical and begins an extensive return to the road as they assimilate to being back on tour. They might be “shaking off the rust” but the band is ready to jump head first into the music scene.
“We’re excited to do it [get back on tour],” lead guitarist Nick Wheeler said in an interview with Billboard.com. 
“Hopefully we’ll get a good long run out of it.”
Tyson Ritter, lead singer and bassist, and Wheeler left behind the chaos of Los Angeles life to seclude themselves in the mountains of Northern Calif., to begin penning the most autobiographical Rejects album known to date.
A cathartic experience for the two, the album began its production in 2011 with the help of producer Greg Wells, the mastermind behind Adele, OneRepublic and other top-of-the-chart artists.
The album encompasses all the qualities fans came to love about the band — catchy pop-rock hooks and rock ballads — yet reveals a whole new side of the All-American Rejects.
“Our goal on this record was to push ourselves into making a sound that was original, beyond, I guess, the other records,” Ritter said in an interview with Billboard.com. “[We didn’t limit] ourselves to just the four-piece rock band instrumentation.”
The first official single off the album, “Beekeeper’s Daughter,” is classic All-American Rejects. Heavily guitar-driven, the song is reminiscent of their earlier stuff back on their first and second albums. Its focus is much more on their classic rock band sound, but they take a few risks in incorporating different sounds like synthesizers and other instruments not common in their usual sound. It’s ridiculously catchy with its lyrics and pop rhythm, which creates a great hook like that of “Dirty Little Secret” and “Swing, Swing.” This song also shows how perfect Ritter’s voice is for their affinity for pop-rock music, a great example at just how important Ritter is to the Rejects’ sound.
“Fast & Slow” reveals the experimental side of the band with its heavy use of synth, similar to Neon Trees’ synth-pop-rock. The song is not lacking in catchiness. The chorus is a prime example of how the band has melded together the sound they’ve streamlined as their own with the leap of faith they’ve taken with trying out new directions to take their music. Their guitar sound is still there; they’ve just used them unconventionally throughout the song, stepping outside the box they drew three albums ago.
“Bleed Into Your Mind,” starts off much different with engineered guitar synth that bleeds into Ritter’s subdued vocals. The background rhythm has a subtle reggae sound in the likeness of Sublime. As a ballad, the song builds into an amalgamation of instrumentals and Ritter’s more powerful vocals that verge on a grittier side of Ritter’s sound, a very new and different direction.
The album isn’t something you fall in love with immediately like their previous albums. It shows how much the band has matured, but also how much they’ve mastered their trademark sound. They know what works for them — ergo the catchy lyrics and guitar-fueled sound — yet went on a limb to take themselves out of their comfort zone. And they did indeed. It’s a fine fourth album effort and the band deserves to be able to experiment. They’ve been together 13 years after all.
