Greg Attonito laughs when asked about nostalgia. “We’ve been doing this for so long we sort of don’t even care anymore,” he shrugs. “We don’t care if it’s too nostalgic or not too nostalgic. We just get in a room and have a good time—and the miracle is, we still like each other.”
That’s the Bouncing Souls in 2019, toasting their 30th anniversary with a double shot of Crucial Moments: an EP and a book stuffed with fan and peer testimonials, weirdly rediscovered photos, and enough stories to remind you that Jersey punks age like cheap beer—loud, fizzy, and stubbornly intact. “We didn’t want to write it,” Attonito says of the book. “We’ve told our story a million times. That’s boring. Let’s see if anyone else has a story about us.”
Someone did. A high school friend tracked down the rando who photographed their first battle of the bands gig in 1989—still alive, still in Texas, still willing to sell prints back to the band. “You’re really gonna make me pay you for these?” Attonito groans. “The guy wasn’t even a photographer. A strange character. But hey, lucky us.”
That origin year shows up again on the EP in “1989,” a track born from guitarist Pete Steinkopf’s nostalgia exercise that nearly derailed into “white guy rap.” Attonito winces at the memory: “It was horrible. Everything we don’t like about music. But somehow magical dust sprinkled on it, and now it’s the band favorite.”
Jersey anthems are the Souls’ currency, a birthright handed down from Bruce Springsteen’s Giant Stadium mass-choirs. Attonito still sounds awestruck: “I was 14, watching 60,000 people sing the verses to ‘Hungry Heart.’ How am I gonna experience that again? That went deep in my soul.”
The Souls’ own history is laced with moments of rebellion—like their cover of “What Boys Like” on The Good, the Bad, and the Argyle, a sideways jab at the male-dominated scene of the early ’90s. “If girls aren’t at our shows, something’s not right,” Attonito insists. And then there’s Hopeless Romantic, the 1999 record that dropped when Blink-182 were sprinting naked across MTV. “We were bad-mouthing those guys back then,” he admits. “Tom even has a Bouncing Souls tattoo. But they blew up by going lowest common denominator. We were like, really? That’s what you’re doing with punk?”
Time has softened the sneer—Attonito calls them friends now—but the Souls never stopped treating songwriting as personal truth. “Whether it’s political or just about having a good time together, if it’s real, it connects,” he says. “We’ve written the silliest dumb songs on purpose because music should bring people together, even if it’s not ‘smart.’”
Three decades in, the Bouncing Souls are still throwing their own party. Only now, you might get an acoustic set before the amps roar, what they’ve dubbed The Hopeless Romantic Club. “A couple songs, a couple stories, and then we plug in,” Attonito says. “It’s our way of acknowledging the 30 years.”
Thirty years, and they’re still trying to top that first singalong.
Listen to the interview above and check out the video below.
