The momentum that Boys Like Girls had going into their fourth studio album, Sunday At Foxwoods, was probably a bit more positive than the band could’ve expected. Having not released any music as a band since 2012, Boys Like Girls could’ve gone in a number of ways, creatively. The Night Game was keeping lead vocalist Martin Johnson busy with a project after Boys Like Girls went on a hiatus, and this 2023 version of the band feels like a marrying of styles and sounds between everything the band members have done (both as solo artists, and as a creative unit). Sunday At Foxwoods is a thrilling return to form for a band that found some early success with their self-titled debut, peaked commercially with Love Drunk (that had a key song feature with a young artist known as Taylor Swift), and they experienced some creative growing pains on Crazy World. The vinyl reissues of Boys Like Girls and Love Drunk seemed to reinvigorate fan interest in the band’s fourth studio album, known as Sunday At Foxwoods, that is kicking off the next phase of this talented pop-rock band.

After a brief, atmospheric introductory song on the title track, Boys Like Girls rock with veteran poise on “The Outside.” It features a stomping, anthemic chorus of, “It’s okay, it’s alright / Baby welcome to life on the outside / Sleep all day, ride all night / Yeah we’re living it up on the outside,” that reminds longtime fans of the band of the magic that happens when these four musicians get together to create music. While longtime lead guitarist Paul DiGiovanni is no longer a part of the band, Jamel Hawke does the band justice by taking over the reins on guitar.

So this is the Hollywood effect, huh? 

A half-decade ago, Boys Like Girls (BLG) were a hard-charging Boston quartet that wrote commercially accessible power-pop with tinges of punk and shared bills with the likes of Spitalfield, Punchline and All Time Low. Heck, one publication even referenced them as 2007’s version of Fall Out Boy. Yet here we are in the latter stages of 2012 and Boys Like Girls sounds distinctly distant from that framework they once laid. To put it succinctly, they sound more like Train than that of Fall Out Boy. 

Whether this has anything to do with Johnson’s relocation to California and his time spent with the likes of Miley Cyrus, Victoria Justice and Hot Chelle Rae, to name a few, is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for certain, when it comes to writing pop hooks few are better than him, and Crazy World is set out to prove exactly that. Whereas 2009’s Love Drunk felt like a band trying too hard, Crazy World finds the quartet swimming in their newfound contentment and reveling in their pop gloss. Any way you slice it, there’s no denying frontman Martin Johnson’s talent for pop hooks and Crazy World is chock full.