Entertainment Weekly reports that, not only are the Goo Goo Dolls still a thing, but they’re releasing a new album, Boxes, on May 6. Hailing from the misguided musical taste of your adolescence, the Goo Goo Dolls moved away from their garage-rock roots and toward the sonic pablum of adult contemporary rock with their 1995 breakout album A Boy Named Goo and 1998’s even-more-successful Dizzy Up The Girl (the latter of which boasts the mega-hit ballad “Iris,” written for that movie where Meg Ryan dies on a bike because she’s not even trying to pay attention to the road). Basically, the Goo Goo Dolls are the kind of band you weren’t afraid to leave in your Discman for your parents to find, because they recognized the songs from the radio and were confident this wasn’t the kind of music that made kids get tattoos.
Now that Goo Goo Doll fans are grown up and have no shortage of guilty pleasures, the band has returned with “a vibrant, sonically forward-looking album that manages to retain what their legions of fans love about the Goo Goo Dolls—indelible melodies, intimate, heartfelt lyrics, and the anthemic, uplifting vibe of their songs—while pushing new boundaries in terms of sound and production,” according to a press release. Sure, every third or fourth song probably will be sung in a constipated stupor by bassist Robby Takac and thus be totally skippable, but the rest of the tracks, wailed by frontman Johnny Rzeznick, will be deliciously cheesy fodder for long commutes to work or drunken karaoke sessions with friends.
The band will be touring throughout North America from July through September, and below you can hear the first single from Boxes, called “Over And Over.” It’s an apt title, because it sounds exactly like all their other songs.