GenturZine

Track List

1. "Calling All Skeletons" - 3:19
2. "Help Me" - 3:44
3. "In Vein" - 3:57
4. "Over and Out" - 3:14
5. "I Found Away" - 4:01
6. "Do You Wanna Know?" - 3:36
7. "Live Young, Die Fast" - 4:14
8. "Love Love, Kiss Kiss" - 3:25
9. "Lost and Rendered" - 3:23
10. "Ruin It" - 3:36
11. "Into the Night" - 3:23

Agony & Irony is the sixth studio album by Alkaline Trio, released on July 1, 2008 on Epic Records. Regarding this album, vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba stated that the band set out to record an "anthemic hard rock record."

A year prior to the album's release, "In Vein", was performed live at Warped Tour 2007, streamed on the band's official fan club on April 3 and was uploaded to the band's MySpace site for 24 hours the following day.

On April 22 an EP with the same title was released on iTunes. The EP featured two tracks which had already been heard by fans and a new song entitled 'Into The Night'.

The album's first single, "Help Me", was released to radio stations on April 28, 2008. The second single has been confirmed to be "I Found Away" and a video was set to be shot in the fall of 2008. In March 2009, the band launched a contest for fans to remix "I Found Away" that will be included on an upcoming digital release titled Remix EP.

Norwegian experimental band Ulver contributed strings, programming and vocals on "Lost & Rendered" and "In My Stomach."

In an interview promoting the album, Matt Skiba cites that:

there’s a theme of duality on the record, it’s sort of a spin on ‘ebony and ivory’ which of course represents black and white. The songs on the new album sort of represent a struggle between good and evil, light and dark, and despair and hope. We felt Agony and Irony was appropriate, I mean we fancy ourselves as being pretty clever, and we felt a play on words was also fitting for the new record. It's also a lyric from 'Flagpole Sitta' by Harvey Danger, so we thought we earn double points for that.

Regarding the record's sound and influences, Skiba states that he was "listening to a lot of Pat Benatar, Def Leppard and a lot of the 80’s MTV music that I grew up with. So that was a big influence in the writing process, bands like The Cars".

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