The Academy Is… made an immediate impression with Almost Here, establishing themselves as one of the more theatrical and polished acts in the early-2000s emo and pop-punk boom. Rather than simply repeat that formula, the band took a considerable left turn with Santi, embracing a more experimental indie-rock sound that divided their audience. Fast Times at Barrington High is essentially the correction. Even its title signals a return to the band’s roots, combining a reference to Fast Times at Ridgemont High with the suburban high school William Beckett and Adam Siska attended. The problem is that the band does not simply revisit what worked. It retreats to it.
Production duo SAM and Sluggo, two of Fueled by Ramen’s prominent hitmakers at the time, helped reshape The Academy Is… from the guitar-heavy rock of Santi into something far more polished, beat-driven and pop-oriented. The guitars are still present, but they are increasingly used as rhythmic texture while layered synthesizers, tighter hooks and four-on-the-floor rhythms push the album toward bright summer pop. The band also relinquished an unusual amount of songwriting control, with SAM and Sluggo receiving co-writing credits on seven tracks, including “About a Girl.” The album is similarly loaded with guest appearances, with Gabe Saporta, Andrew McMahon, Blake Healy, Mason Musso and Alex Suarez all contributing. It is an unusually collaborative approach for this corner of the scene and reinforces how deliberately commercial the record sounds.
“About a Girl” makes that new direction immediately apparent. As the opening track and lead single, it functions as a mission statement that The Academy Is… were leaving the experimentalism of Santi behind. A bouncy dance-rock groove rides on four-on-the-floor hi-hat drumming and muted, rhythm-focused guitar stabs, while the chorus gives Beckett a soaring, heavily layered vocal surrounded by shimmering guitars. It is undeniably effective. For longtime fans who wanted the band to sound like the group they remembered from Almost Here, this was almost engineered to remind them why they fell in love with The Academy Is… in the first place.
The lyrical world follows suit, returning to suburban high school melodrama, secret romances, bitter farewells and the anxieties of growing up. “After the Last Midtown Show” uses the closing of a familiar venue as a metaphor for the end of an era, much like leaving high school means watching an entire social world disappear. There is an appealing nostalgia throughout the record, but it also exposes the album’s greatest conceptual problem. The Academy Is… had spent the years between Almost Here and Fast Times at Barrington High growing alongside their audience, yet the songwriting repeatedly returns to the emotional framework of adolescence. What once felt immediate increasingly feels like a band looking backward.
“His Girl Friday,” named after the Cary Grant film, is arguably the album’s darkest song. Its narrator is involved in a secret tryst with a woman who belongs to someone else every day except Friday, when she becomes “his girl Friday.” Siska’s bassline carries the verses alongside sparse, staccato funk-pop guitar riffs before the chorus erupts into a four-on-the-floor pulse. Subtle synthesizer leads linger underneath the arrangement and become more prominent during the bridge, while the production isolates Beckett’s voice before bringing the full arrangement back around him. The song’s subject matter is considerably more complicated than the album’s glossy exterior suggests, giving the record one of its most interesting moments of tension.
“Automatic Eyes” similarly deals with the collapse of trust inside a long-term relationship. Its central hook, “with your automatic eyes, five years disappeared/five years disappeared that night,” captures how quickly years of intimacy can become meaningless once betrayal is exposed. The verses are tight and nervous, built from interlocking guitar riffs that create a sense of unease before exploding into a wall-of-sound chorus. Beckett moves between hurried, almost whispered verses and emotional belting, giving the song a dynamic range that the album’s otherwise controlled production occasionally lacks.
The record’s greatest weakness is that its safety becomes increasingly obvious as it progresses. SAM and Sluggo are effective at what they are trying to accomplish, and there is nothing inherently wrong with a polished pop-rock production. The problem is that The Academy Is… had already demonstrated that they could take risks. Santi may have alienated listeners, but its willingness to experiment gave the band a distinct identity. Fast Times at Barrington High instead sounds like a calculated attempt to reclaim an audience, and the result is an album that frequently feels more like a correction than a creative evolution.
That decision also creates a strange disconnect between the album and the people it was trying to win back. The fans who discovered Almost Here had grown up during the years that followed, yet the band returned to high school romances and adolescent melodrama as though its audience had remained frozen in place. The nostalgia is occasionally charming, but it becomes harder to connect with when the album itself feels unwilling to acknowledge how much the band and its listeners had changed. Had Fast Times at Barrington High followed Almost Here as the band’s second album, its direction would likely have felt like a natural progression. Coming after Santi, it feels like regression.
There are enough strong songs here to prevent Fast Times at Barrington High from becoming a failure. “About a Girl” is an excellent pop-rock single, “His Girl Friday” introduces some welcome darkness and “Automatic Eyes” demonstrates that Beckett and the band could still turn relationship anxiety into compelling drama. The production is clean, energetic and remarkably consistent with its goals. But those goals are precisely what make the album frustrating. The Academy Is… responded to the divisiveness of Santi by retreating into a safer version of themselves, trading experimentation for accessibility and maturity for nostalgia. Fast Times at Barrington High ultimately sounds less like a band discovering where to go next than one trying to convince its old audience that it never left.
For Fans Of:
The Rocket Summer — Do You Feel
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