Sister Cities (album)

After the release of No Closer to Heaven in 2015, The Wonder Years spent two years on a massive world tour to support the album. Along the way, vocalist Dan Campbell kept a journal to document experiences and feelings, and the band took photographs of everything they saw. Following the tour, Campbell went through the collections and highlighted excerpts he felt were meaningful. Through this reflection, lyrics began to take shape, and the band worked to compose music that fit the mood of the lyrical content. According to Remfry Dedman of The Independent, Sister Cities came together from this process as "a record that seeks to create unity in a world that is becoming increasingly segregated".[3]

Unity is a central theme on Sister Cities. As the band traveled the world, Campbell saw parallels between his own life and the lives of those perceived to be completely different.[3] The title came about when The Wonder Years were waiting at a bus station in Santiago, Chile, after their scheduled tour stop in the city was cancelled. This bus station is near a monument that commemorated the city's international ties. While they were waiting, fans in Santiago asked them to play a different show. The band agreed, and fans picked them up from the station and took them to the venue, where they played for about 100 people. In an interview with Kerrang!, Campbell describes the experience fondly, stating that, "it got me thinking about how we were in a country with no particular reason for being there, and how immediately welcomed we felt when those kids helped us out and put us up for the night".[4] This idea that individuals can find like-minded people thousands of miles from home stuck with Campbell, and the monuments near the Santiago bus station signified this connection, hence the name Sister Cities.[3]

In late January 2018, The Wonder Years began to tease the album's release. They sent postcards to fans with a minimal version of the album's cover art on one side and a short excerpt from the title track, "Sister Cities", on the other. Other fans received unlabeled 7" vinyl records that held a spoken word poem and an early version of a new song.[5] The band followed this with a worldwide scavenger hunt. They created a site on the domain withpinsandstrings.com and posted the geographic coordinates of posters they placed around the world, asking fans to work together online and find other fans near those locations to visit the coordinates and find the site's password. Once the password was deciphered and entered, the site revealed a teaser video for the album with clips from various songs and reflections from the band's members on the making of the Sister Cities.[6][7][8]

On February 9, the first official single and title track "Sister Cities" was released, accompanied by a music video.[9] The Wonder Years followed up a month later, on March 9, with the release of "Pyramids of Salt", the second and final single leading up to the release of the album.[10] In the days before the album's release, the band held interactive pop-up shops in Chicago and Philadelphia to promote the new release.[11] These shops featured exclusive merchandise, live acoustic performances by the band, and even an on-site tattoo artist. On April 3, The Independent offered an exclusive stream of Sister Cities and an in-depth interview with vocalist Dan Campbell.[3]

The album was officially released on April 6, 2018 on CD, vinyl, and all streaming platforms.[3][12] The Wonder Years also released a limited edition vinyl version complete with a book of poems, journals, and photos from their world tour. The material in the book inspired the songs on Sister Cities, allowing fans to follow along with the writings and pictures as they are listening.[13]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.9/10[14]
Metacritic	82/100[15]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[16]
DIY	[17]
Exclaim!	9/10[18]
The Line of Best Fit	8/10[19]
Pitchfork	7.1/10[20]

Sister Cities was met with "universal acclaim" reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an average score of 82 based on 9 reviews.[15] Aggregator Album of the Year gave the release a 84 out of 100 based on a critical consensus of 10 reviews.[21]

Timothy Monger of AllMusic said "Ranging from warmly introspective alt-rock to full-throated emo, the band explores themes of distance, detachment, and interconnectedness: concepts they noted over and over during their global travels."[16] Luke O'Neil of Pitchfork writes that Sister Cities sees the band "leaving suburban frivolity behind for broader musical horizons, darker thematic material, and dozens of imitators".[20] Adam Feibel of Exclaim! scored the album at a 9/10, calling it "fresh and ambitious without taking a step too far", going on to say it is the band's "most fully realized work".[18]

All tracks are written by The Wonder Years.

Personnel per booklet.[1] All songs written by The Wonder Years. Lyrics and poetry written by Dan Campbell, edited by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.