Good Luck is a beloved punk band from Bloomington, Indiana that time has scattered across hundreds of miles. Their new record Big Dreams, Mister (the title of which should be read in the voice of an early 20th-century newsie) is their first in fourteen years, and it fucking rips. It exists in the rarified air of Superchunk’s fantastic post-hibernation record Majesty Shredding and not those “why would they do this?” reunion records of beloved bands whomst shall go unnamed. It is equal parts highly-concentrated effort, pressure-free creativity and the thirst to settle unfinished business after the band stopped making music together in 2012. Except not as dramatic as all that.
Fifteen or so years ago, my band played a show with Good Luck in a makeshift bike shop. I had been obsessively listening to their (classic) first record Into Lake Griffy for months, but was still blown away. Matt Tobey sang while playing two really hard guitar parts simultaneously, Mike Harpring bashed his drums with force that made the kit wobble as if on the brink of toppling over and Ginger Alford glued it all together with winding basslines as the power of voice annihilated the sorrows of everyone in that small area of a parking garage. The crust punks, the sweet nerds and everyone in between bopped into each other and sang along as we all sweatily witnessed something very special.
I’ve seen Good Luck a lot since then and it’s always like this. However, it can be a drag to try to meet the standards we set for ourselves. As they were working on their follow-up, they faced an eternal musician’s problem – when questing to make something great, how can you maintain the sense of fun that made you love playing music with your friends in the first place? Good Luck’s (classic) second record Without Hesitation is a tremendous follow-up, but the journey was overwrought and left the band to fizzle out under a year after its release.
~~~ MONTAGE: As the years pass, Tobey goes to school and starts a bakery with his partner Lisa Dorazewski, Alford helps run Bloomington’s best vegan restaurant and Harpring moves to Philadelphia where he now works as a carpenter. They all play music and while Harpring plays with several hardcore bands and does a fair bit of touring, the rest of the band backs away from their former lives. Alford contributes a song or two to a few great bands, but mostly relishes in playing in friends’ bands. Tobey releases a solo record shortly before becoming a dad and lets his guitar sit untouched in its case for five years. ~~~
In 2023, low key texts start popping up in the group chat, and plans are made to hang at a borrowed practice space in Cleveland just to see if making music together still feels good. The secret reunion is surprisingly comfortable and everything clicks back into place. After two weekends jamming, a few loose ideas turn into songs which get recorded with fellow noodlepunk Joe Reinhart (Hop Along, Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball) as the garden continues to grow around them. Half a year passes, and after a few more weekend-long bursts of songwriting, the band returns to Reinhart to finish what will become their (classic) third record – Big Dreams, Mister. Good Luck is back, just like that.
Along the way, the band rejects the all-consuming nature of being in a full-time band, finding tight pockets of time to capture lightning in a bottle while making sure to ask each other if they’re still having fun. The freedom from expectations yields an open-hearted batch of songs that ironically exceeds the expectations of a great band reuniting out of nowhere, just to see what it’d be like.
Listening to Big Dreams, Mister feels like breathing clean air, like feeling love in a world of hate or any number of hyperbolic tropes music writers would bestow upon some rando to try and sell you some bullshit, but it’s for real this time. The songs have an adventurous excitement to them. The band goes hard as chord progressions occasionally spiral up and down unpredictably and while teetering on the edge of chaos, they lock into some big bouncy hook, moving like one organism, the magic alchemy of years past as alive as ever. Ginger and Matt tackle parenthood, depression, and the general confusion of existence with gut-punch lyrics outlined by an optimism that doesn’t feel saccharine and much-needed encouragement that feels earned.
But as fantastic as it is, you know what? Good Luck don’t care if this is your favorite Good Luck record. They made this one for them, to keep a big part of their lives from dangling unfinished, and for Tobey to show his kids that adults can do hard things too. They’ve escaped the misery of watching the thing they loved become a source of anxiety, taken those lessons with them throughout life, and a decade on the other side of it they’re having a chill time making great music only Good Luck can make. You can hear the joy in every moment. I guess we should all try to stress out a little bit less, huh?
– Jeff Rosenstock