Following a contentious breakup in 2005, it seemed realistic to believe that we had seen the end of the Get Up Kids.  After all, the band’s associated genre has long since been absorbed by mascara-clad wannabes, and the band’s last two albums had fallen mostly on deaf ears.  Yet, here they were, five grownups – the members of the Get Up Kids have been long removed from being actual kids– taking the stage with Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999” appropriately playing in the background.

“Thanks for still giving a shit, everybody,” Get Up Kids frontman Matt Pryor would later say, and all the fanfare seemed appropriate.  For all of the drama surrounding the band’s breakup and the awkward maturation of the power pop/emo darlings, the Get Up Kids always maintained a passionate fanbase. The tracks off of their earlier material have aged well (if not partly due to nostalgia), and the densely packed Emo’s revealed that they hadn’t lost many of those fans in the band’s alienating On A Wire days.

A bounty of Austin notables came out to watch, including Britt Daniels of Spoon and Ume’s Lauren Larson.  The Get Up Kids introduced themselves with “Holiday”, one of the more blistering pop-punk tracks off of Something to Write Home About.  The audience immediately drowned out Pryor and company with its own singing, a testament to the infectious pop melodies the group had always had at its disposal.  Despite the layoff, the band sounded perfectly in tune, and though a decade old the tracks had the audience immediately fired up. The strained, nasally release of Pryor was immediately enjoyable: it’s a voice that is inherently imperfect, making it all the more sincere when layered atop the power chord-fueled songs.

The twenty-track set encompassed the entirety of the band’s career. The group’s early offering, Four Minute Mile, was well represented (“Don’t Hate Me”, “Coming Clean”) and prompted a few crowd-surfers and thrown beer cans.  Songs from the latter part of the catalogue (“Overdue”, “Campfire Kansas”) divvied up the pace, but it was the power pop songs - from “Mass Pike” to the closer, “Ten Minutes”- that received the most raucous ovations.  Fist pumps and impromptu moshpits rekindled the pop-punk glory days, while a smiling Pryor revealed that maybe the band was actually able to enjoy each other’s company once again.  Still, the performance wasn’t without surprises: the Get Up Kids broke out two new, yet to be recorded tracks, hinting at future releases.

True, the group is long past the high school emotions that drove them to their early success: frontman Pryor has two children now and the rest of the band has gone on with their own professional endeavors.  Still, the Get Up Kids always managed to carve a distinctive niche in the musical landscape.  They were too charming and honest to genuinely dislike, and the band penned consistently catchy songs without a grain of arrogance.  Whether the Get Up Kids are performing for the sake of nostalgia or for the sake of business, it doesn’t matter.  They’re back together, and plenty of us still give a shit.