At one time or another every band reaches a turning point when they have to decide who they are and what direction they want to forge ahead with. Over the course of their past two records Almost Here and Santi, The Academy Is… have became one of the most creative acts in the pop- punk circuit—however not even the band’s most strident supporters would predict the evolution they’d undergo with their third album, Fast Times At Barrington High, a collection of songs takes its moniker from the high school that frontman William Beckett and bassist Adam T. Siska attended in the suburbs of Chicago and not only bookends the first chapter of the band’s history, but also looks toward the future. In other words, if the Academy were Almost Here three years ago, they’ve finally arrived.

“Recording [this album] was a really cool process because it was like the Replacements making Tim or Let It Be, where they went in and wrote the songs and recorded them in a week or two and it felt really spontaneous,” Siska explains when asked why the band decided to release Fast Times At Barrington High just over a year after their last disc. “A month or two after releasing Santi we already had a lot more to say, so I think all along we wanted to put out this record a lot faster,” he elaborates. “We wanted to go back to the sixties where if you had the songs in you, you wanted to get them out; I’d like say that we’ll be recording another record a year from now.”

Beckett is quick to stress that the process behind the recording of Fast Times At Barrington High was also instrumental to its sound. Essentially, Beckett roamed his Windy City stomping grounds to pull inspiration, while the rest of the band holed up in Los Angeles to perfect their own batch of pop anthem. When it came time to record, the band went to a makeshift studio in the their management office in Manhattan to lay the songs onto tape with the help of producers Sam Hollander and Dave Katz (Gym Class Heroes, We The Kings, Metro Station.), who Beckett met while making a guest appearance on Cobra Starship’s “Snakes On A Plane.”