Guilt Show by Get Up Kids

Guilt Show, the Get Up Kids' fourth album, came out on Vagrant in 2004, made by a band trying to win its own crowd back. On a Wire, two years earlier, had swapped their early emo rush for layered alternative rock; critics loved it, fans mostly didn't, and singer-guitarist Matt Pryor admitted the mellow new songs fell flat onstage.

So the Kansas City band went home and started writing again, with a dozen ideas stacked up by that October, all while they were busy buying their own studio, Red House Recordings in Eudora, Kansas. Ed Rose produced, James Dewees was on keyboards, and Pryor's voice still carries that cracked, heart-on-sleeve ache. "Sympathy" is the song that found the countdowns. It turned out to be their last album for a long while: internal conflicts split the band in 2005, and nothing new arrived until Simple Science in 2010.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.