Celebration Rock is the second album by Canadian rock-duo Japandroids, released June 5, 2012. The album fuses indie and punk rock. It has spawned two official singles in “Younger Us” and “The House That Heaven Built” and also features a cover of “For the Love of Ivy” by The Gun Club. Celebration Rock has also received critical acclaim from numerous places including having an aggregate score of 85 from MetaCritic and receiving an 8.8/10 from Pitchfork Media.

Like Post-Nothing, the album features eight songs, clocking in at 35 minutes. Brian King commented:

For our band, with the kind of songs that we write and the way we play and what we’re trying to deliver to the listener, you don’t really want more than eight songs. You don’t want a 72-minute Japandroids record. I know a lot of really hard-core Japandroids fans think they want that. But they don’t. Our music is best delivered in short, chaotic bursts.

Although using the same recording studio and the same producer, Jesse Gander, you can hear a huge leap in sound. King’s vocals are more foregrounded and less hazy than on Post-Nothing and soundwise, guitar and drums sound way slicker and less distorted and rough, although keeping the same feel of intensity and necessity. King said:

Anyone can make a shitty second album. I wanted to expand on the inclusive nature of the band and the songs, which I didn’t understand until ‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ came out and I saw what that could do. I felt like I had so much more to give. So much more to give to songs, so much more to give to an album

Japandroids take us on a journey of a man who longs for his youth. “Younger Us” is the first official single from Celebration Rock, actually being released in 2010, 2 years before the album’s official release.

The story of a spontaneous relationship started simply from a woman’s personality. How beautiful.

The song’s title is a play off the 1982 album The Days of Wine and Roses by The Dream Syndicate. Brian King mentioned the enormous influence of The Dream Syndicate on the album process of Celebration Rock several times (here or here).

The Dream Syndincate, however, borrowed the title of their album/song off the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses” which depicts the downward spiral of the lives of two average Americans who succumb to alcoholism and attempt to deal with their problem.

To go Full History, the movie’s screenwritter JP Miller found the title in a poem by English writer Ernest Dowson), published in 1896:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Tyler, The Creator returns as his infamous alter-ego Young Nigga on comedy sketch show ‘Loiter Squad. Releasing a follow up to Come Threw Looking Clean to rap about what’s missing in the rap game today!

“Empire” contains allusions to many things, such as biblical references on the chorus and a The Three Little Pigs citation on the pre-chorus. Lyrically, it talks about depression and how society treats these “misunderstood people”—let them sing.

In a track-by-track interview with MetalFuckingRocks, vocalist Oli Sykes explained:

It’s quite Deftones-inspired, the feel. Lyrically it’s one of my favourites, because it’s one of the few where I wrote the lyrics before I wrote the melodies. Most of the time I’ve found out that that doesn’t work, but it gave me a lot of freedom.