Knuckle Puck, from left: Kevin Maida (guitar) Ryan Rumchaks (bass), Joe Taylor (vocals), John Siorek (drums), and Nick Casasanto (guitar, vocals) credit:PAX(bands sponsor) Knuckle Puck Releases Their First Debut Album “Copacetic” Maddie Engler October 27,2016 Knuckle Puck is a pop punk band from the suburbs of Chicago, I.L. The band started off as strictly a cover band, but the band started getting a small following and attention from other bands and started releasing their own EPs in 2011. The band has released the EPs While I stay Secluded,Split and the Weight that Buried You. With their fast and aggressive pop punk sound, the band signed with Rise Records and began work on their first studio album along with new bassist Ryan Rumchaks. Frontman Joe Taylor, guitarists Nick Casasanto and Kevin Maida , along with John Siorek on the drums and Ryan Rumchaks on bass,have been taking the pop punk genre by storm. The band started to get a following after they toured with Neck Deep and State Champs. Currently, the band is touring with The Wonder Years in North American. The band released their debut album “Copacetic” July 31, 2015. The word copacetic is defined as “in perfect sequence or order.” In this thematic album, the title Copacetic is ironic considering the content of the album. The whole album has 11 songs, and all of them are about pain, decay,and breakups. The concept of Copacetic irony continues in the lyrics. In the love­lost song Untitled, Taylor sings“you tore me down, I’ll tell you everything is copacetic. ” Clearly this is an oxymoron, because Taylor is saying two opposites together. This also occurs in the song Ponder off the album. Taylor belts the powerful sorrow filled words “I’m losing all the faith I have in my ability to breathe.” This is followed by ” I’ll tell you everything is copacetic.” Once again, this is irony because Taylor belts everything is perfect when the whole song is about pain. Not to mention the vocal techniques Taylor uses to enhance this effect. Taylor drops the volume of his voice and softens his tone when he sings this lyric saying everything is okay, in contrast to the rough, loud and raspy lyrics Taylor sang earlier in the song. Fast,loud and bold. These are the words that come to my mind when thinking about the album Copacetic. The album has 11 tracks and a lot of power behind them. One of the most memorable songs on the album is Untitled, partially due to the length of it. This song is 7:51 minutes long. After Rumchak’s strong and angry bass heavy main lyrics of the song, there is a soft instrumental with the soft words “I’ll tell you everything is copacetic.”Another memorable song on the album is Evergreen. This song is about strength and persevering through tough times. The song has a fast tempo due to Siorek as it is, but it speeds up even more at the end with the very memorable lyrics “I’ll leave this all behind for you when I’m gone, you grew from a seed forever strong as a pine tree always an Evergreen.” This is one of the tracks on the album that really shows off Taylor’s smooth voice and his range. The most powerful song in the album is Pretense. Pretense has a really strong and angry tone with Rumchak’s strong fast bass and Siorek’s powerful drumming. This song also has spoken lyrics which help to convey anger and more emotion into the song. The powerful lyrics include ”How dare you guilt me for not sticking around as if you ever did for me? I’ll leave you in the dark with a broken flashlight. You left me with a choice and a pretense.” These rest of the album is a mix of loud guitar riffs from Maida and powerful lyrics that you can’t help but sing and scream along too. The cover art for this album is subtle and minimalistic. It is hard to catch the meaning of the cover art without paying attention. The aesthetic cover has a stopwatch, a dice, an origami frog, glasses, and flowers. A sketched stopwatch shows a sequence. Delicate glasses frames symbolize Taylors glasses and it also adds to the irony of this album because glasses are needed if you don’t have perfect vision while the title of the album is about perfection. This same idea is shown with the origami. The die is the most obvious of all the symbols. The dice is clearly to represent the sequence of numbers which relates to the album title. The cover art of this album adds to the ironic theme. Copacetic has really been the “breakthrough” Knuckle Puck has been waiting for This album has much better sound quality than their previous EPs. The album has gotten a lot of attention and garnered great ratings, selling over 8,000 copies in the first week it was released. The album reached number 66 on the Billboard Top 200. It also ranked in the Top 20 on many Billboard charts and in the Top 50 in the United Kingdom’s chart. I would highly recommend this album to anyone who enjoys music from bands such as The Story So Far, The Wonder Years,and Neck Deep. .