Jimmy Eat World

Jimmy Eat World crawled out of Mesa, Arizona, in 1993, and the thing that sets them apart from half the guitar bands on the modern-rock dial is how little the lineup has budged. Jim Adkins sings and plays lead guitar, Tom Linton plays rhythm and sings too, Zach Lind drums, and Rick Burch took the bass in 1995 after Mitch Porter's early run ended. Every studio album after the first has those same four names on it, which in a scene that runs on breakups is close to a miracle.

Bleed American, in 2001, is where the rest of the world caught up. It's pop-punk buffed to a power-pop shine without the brains getting sanded off: thick, crunching guitars, drums that punch rather than pummel, and choruses engineered for shouting along in a moving car. "The Middle" was the one nobody could escape, and it topped the Alternative Songs chart, but the record had depth behind it. "Sweetness", "A Praise Chorus", the title track and "Get It Faster" all made the case that this was a band with a whole album of hooks, not a lucky single, and four of its singles landed in that chart's top 20. The album went platinum.

Futures followed in 2004 and went gold, a moodier, heavier-hearted set that still gave radio "Pain", another song that went all the way to No. 1 on the alternative chart, and "Work". Chase This Light, in 2007, turned out to be their highest-charting album of all, climbing to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 behind "Big Casino".

They never went away after that. Invented arrived in 2010 with "My Best Theory", then Damage in 2013 and Integrity Blues in 2016, which brought "Sure and Certain" to rock radio, and Surviving landed in October 2019 as their tenth album. Somewhere between emo pop, alternative rock and plain old power pop, they built a sound that doesn't date: earnest without being soggy, loud without being dumb.

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