It took a while, but in early 2014 I finally got into Fucked Up’s 2011 cinematic punk rock opus David Comes To Life. This belated immersion into an album I’ve known about for a while had to due with two things mainly: lead singer Damian Abraham’s voice can be a bit of a hurdle to get over if you don’t listen to a ton of hardcore punk (which I don’t really), and then there’s also the fact that what little hardcore I’ve listened to seems to work better in short, EP-sized bursts, rather than David‘s epic 70-minute running time. But if you’re willing to embrace these things, David Comes To Life is just a non-stop, bonecrushingly awesome experience, plain and simple. But enough about that album, what about this one, right? Well, that’s the thing. It’s hard for something as reeled-in as Glass Boys (it keeps to a tight 42 minutes) to escape comparisons to a previous work that was just so ambitious, and not feel a little unsatisfying almost by default. Yet I wouldn’t write this album off, since songs like “Sun Glass” and “The Art Of Patrons” combine Fucked Up’s inherent loudness with their more melodic side in ways that are just as fist-pumplingly intense as anything on David Comes To Life. And in the process prove that even though these lifelong punks are learning to scale things back at this point, the fire still burns harder and faster than ever.