The Get Up Kids are currently on tour with Sparta playing their classic 1997 debut album Four Minute Mile in full for its 25th anniversary, and now the album is also getting a reissue for the occasion. We've teamed with them on an exclusive "dreamsicle" colored vinyl variant of the reissue, limited to 500 copies. Order yours while they last. That's a mock-up of the variant above.
Four Minute Mile was written while the band was still in high school, produced by Shellac's Bob Weston, and originally released on September 30, 1997 via Doghouse Records. Along with the band's 1999 sophomore album Something to Write Home About, it's become one of the most influential emo albums of all time. Here's what we said about it in a recent retrospective:
The Get Up Kids' 1997 debut album Four Minute Mile combined the driving, hooky indie-punk of Superchunk and the more tangled sounds of Midwest emo and helped create the blueprint for early/mid 2000s emo-pop in the process. Whether or not The Get Up Kids wear that badge proudly is a different story, but they broke a lot of musical ground and I'm of the opinion that it should be celebrated. Their 1999 sophomore album Something To Write Home About is their crowning achievement, but the seeds were already being sewn on the rougher Four Minute Mile which was pretty influential itself too. It's more than just a dry run for STWHA; it's home to all-time Get Up Kids classics like "Don't Hate Me," "Coming Clean," "No Love" and "Shorty" that still sound great today, and it's a distinctly different album than the one that followed it. STWHA is nearly perfect but Four Minute Mile is charmingly flawed, and sometimes you're craving something rawer and punkier than the more polished-up and ballad-inclusive Something To Write Home About. For those times, there's Four Minute Mile.
The tour (which also finds them playing 1997's Woodson EP) hits Asbury Park tonight (9/28) for a sold-out show at House of Independents and wraps up in Philly on Thursday (9/29) at Union Transfer. We caught them playing the album in full at Chicago's Riot Fest (pics, review).
Pick up our variant here.