LP4 is a huge hurdle for The Menzingers. Whenever a band goes up against themselves, it’s an enormous test of their staying power and ability to grow within their own sound. The popularity and cult-like adoration surrounding 2012’s On The Impossible Past makes it obvious that The Menzingers are The Menzingers’ biggest competitors when it comes to Rented World, as the questions surrounding this release view it pointedly as a “follow-up,” and whether that follow-up could possibly meet lofty expectations. 

This is fair and unfair for the Scranton, PA quartet. When I reviewed Transit’s Young New England, and completely trashed that album, I wrote that the band had set a standard for excellence in the past – a standard that I held them to with their new work. The Menzingers are in exactly the same boat. At the same time, it’s daunting to give an encore to an album as holistically spectacular and sweeping in nature as the Americana-tinged, story-telling punk rock that Impossible Past offered us; as vocalist and guitarist Greg Barnett explained to Exclaim! Magazine, “…when we first started writing, even the first note, it was like, ’Oh, where do we start?’” [Italics added for emphasis.]