“Jesus Christ, I’m 26,” Dan Campbell screamed on the Wonder Years’ “Passing Through A Screen Door,” perhaps the earliest onset of midlife crisis ever captured in pop music. Dedicating one’s life to any kind of band certainly magnifies a sense of arrested development when friends are getting married, having kids, and owning homes, exponentially so when that band plays pop-punk. With COVID and social media accelerationism irrevocably warping our relationship with the passage of time, it’s unsurprising that someone in 2024 can feel like their life is already over by their junior year of college. Having spent nearly half his 20 years immersed in the depths of Wikipedia and Discogs, Holden Wolf admits, “I straight up don’t know how to be normal.” And that panic is the main driver of Combat’s Stay Golden, a classically bombastic pop-punk opus about the futility of existence.

“I feel like quitting everything/ School, job and music industry isn’t made out for me,” Wolf brays on Combat’s latest single, “The Epic Season Finale.” “I didn’t really have these feelings until I started hanging out with people where music isn’t their whole life,” he admits during our Zoom conversation. “They can talk to people at a party. I gotta talk about Arab On Radar right now.” Indeed, “Broken hearted kids don’t party/ Like their parents did in the ’90s” serves as the chorus of Stay Golden’s title track, a frankly confounding thing to hear if you remember experiencing the Clinton era as a time defined by Hootie And The Blowfish, triangulation, and techno-optimism — even if Friends is as distant from the current day as Green Acres was in 1995.

Things move even faster in the overlapping realms of emo and pop-punk, and Stay Golden reflects a reality where Prince Daddy And The Hyena and Origami Angel are living legends and Titus Andronicus and Bomb The Music Industry! are gods. As Wolf started conceptualizing Combat, the emerging fifth wave of emo defined by the frenzied, finger-tapping likes of Ogbert The Nerd, Oolong, hey, ily!, Guitar Fight From Fooly Cooly, and Record Setter already “felt like history happening.” They entered the fray themselves in 2022 with Text Me When You Get Back – “We recorded that album in nine, maybe 12 hours at most, and then mixed it ourselves,” Wolf recalls. “I didn’t know if it was good or not, because we didn’t really know what we were doing.” Nonetheless, it slowly became a word-of-mouth success, typified by Combat playing shows in Ohio to “literally three people,” but one person would know all the words. “There was some kid who wrote about the song ‘Worst First’ in their college application and got in,” Wolf notes.

It’s a pretty bold choice, since “Worst First” is specifically about an impostor syndrome that amplified for Wolf when he started seeing Ryland Heagy of Origami Angel at Combat shows in Washington D.C. — “Gami Gang is one of the best records I’ve heard in my whole life,” Wolf beams — which sparked a relationship that led to Heagy producing Stay Golden. Not surprisingly, the zealous ambitions of Gami Gang and Vacation served as a touchstone for Stay Golden — though even with two eight-minute suites, the album clocks in at taut 43 minutes, eschewing the “multiple hours” of bonus tracks, interludes, and alternate takes that Wolf imagined for a deluxe version before the record was even completed. Wolf doesn’t always get talked out of his zanier ideas – Combat performed as a duodecet Mega Combat before ever making a recording and also dressed as elves for Christmas Combat. “I have a really hard time writing a song for anybody but myself,” Wolf muses. “It feels a little selfish considering how many people are working on it, but I’m so thrilled they like it because it is truly, fully, honestly and entirely just an album for me.”

Below, hear “Epic Season Finale” and read our interview.

Do you consider Combat to be your personal songwriting project or a full-on band at this point?

WOLF: For a while, it was just me, and when we started playing shows, I was obsessed with the Bomb The Music Industry! thing where it’s like a collective. But that was super not sustainable for a touring band. We did a couple shows where we had two drummers facing each other and four bassists and stuff like that before we even had a first record out. And I’m really glad we don’t do that anymore. I found a really good core of four people, and I will come to them with pretty much full, entire songs. And then we’ll be like, “Cool, let’s play these songs live for a year.” And then we’ll see how they look after that, and then we’ll record them. We were just a better band when we weren’t a 12-piece.

How do you manage to convince people to join a 12-piece pop-punk/emo band?

WOLF: I set up a show for Teenage Halloween when I was like 17, and it was kind of in the middle of nowhere at a church because that was the only place I could have it. And I thought that, since we were playing around a lot [locally], our friends probably wouldn’t care to see us… but they would if I got every single person who liked my band and knew how to play an instrument to play the set, and they could see 12-piece Combat. And we actually did that three or four times, we called it Mega Combat and it was kind of awesome.

Who were your models for organizing a band of that size?

WOLF: Black Eyes, from DC – we were totally obsessed with their lineup, particularly the drummers facing each other. That was part of it, and also those videos on YouTube that’s like 100 drummers and 100 singers playing “Everlong.” But it was mostly just stupidity. It didn’t work, like…it wasn’t very good, but it was loud.

Speaking of DMV legends, I noticed a Dan Deacon reference on “The Epic Season Finale.” How old are you right now?

WOLF: I’m 20.

That means you would’ve been three years old when Spiderman Of The Rings came out.

WOLF: Oh, but Spiderman Of The Rings changed my life. In every music class, I’d be like, “Have you heard ‘Woody Woodpecker‘? That song’s awesome.”

It truly is, I went back and watched the “Crystal Cat” live video filmed by Pitchfork TV and it looks like it could be a Hate5six joint.

WOLF: It’s crazy. That’s one of my favorite songs of all time too.

How did you discover that album?

WOLF: I lived in Baltimore and when I was really young, I was wrapped up in a DIY scene around the Charm City Art Space where a bunch of really, really awesome bands would play all of the time. My parents showed me Dan Deacon, and I was like, “Oh, this is really cool.” And then I showed my bassist Dan Deacon, and then he showed me Animal Collective. This is all happening at like 11 years old. We’re like, “Whoa, this is so much cooler than Daft Punk.”

I gotta admit, as a 44-year old, it’s kinda mind-blowing to think about an 11-year old listening to Dan Deacon. Whenever I see people in their early teens at Pitchfork Festival, I wonder if I should feel bad that they’re being exposed to cool music from the jump and missing out on formative experiences of being into shitty radio rock.

WOLF: I definitely just spent too much of high school on Wikipedia and Discogs and stuff like that. So I would say I’m an abnormal case in that regard.

I have to ask how someone who was listening to Baltimore noise rock as a pre-teen ended up making kinda pop-punk, kinda ska, kinda emo concept albums a decade later. The opposite trajectory usually happens.

WOLF: I can tell you exactly what the trajectory was. I generally grew up around ska, so I understood what it was and how it worked. But I was really into the indie noise stuff when I was super young, and then I started getting really into DC punk like Fugazi, and they were my favorite band for a really, really long time. And then I discovered Rites Of Spring because I was obsessed with Fugazi, and then I found out that people called that music “emo.” And so I’m like, okay, cool, I’m gonna listen to Sunny Day Real Estate and they’re kind of awesome. And then maybe My Chemical Romance – which I said was really bad when I was young – is probably pretty good, and then I listened to them. And so in that very linear trajectory, I discovered music at 19 years old that I should have been listening to when I was 12. And when I found Bomb The Music Industry!, that was honestly from being obsessed with Prince Daddy [And The Hyena], who we played with two days ago. That was like the fun stuff from when I liked Ponytail, they’re doing all the crazy indulgent stuff but they’re also making ska.

There’s a rich history of “Damn, my friends are starting families and having stable jobs, while I’ve dedicated my life to this pop-punk band” concept records, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard that expressed by someone who’s 20 years old. What are your peers doing at this age that inspired you to think, “I’ve wasted my life”?

WOLF: Uh…you know, they can, like, talk to people at a party. I can’t hang out right now, I’m dubbing cassette tapes that I’m going to bring to school and then people are going to be like, “That’s stupid.” I’ll be like, “Yeah, no, maybe you’re actually kind of right.” I was always kind of “music business brain,” not in like I’m trying to make money, but just kind of, “I gotta order blank cassette tapes right now so that I can get them for this band by this day.” And I wasn’t sitting around playing video games like I should have been.

What was your sales pitch to bands as a 15-year old label head?

WOLF: I would tell people I really liked them, that I was willing to spend $100 to make a bunch of records for them and not ask for money back.

That’s not the most sustainable business model, but I’m sure there are moments that made you think, “Yeah, it’s worth it anyway.”

WOLF: My first band, Dakota Condition, was noise rock, and looking back on it, you could definitely tell that we recorded it and mixed it when we were 15. But it sounds really, really mature in retrospect, because our music now is a lot more childish. And then our guitarist, Max, has a solo project called Really Really, and I put out a record for him that I was just blown away by. And it felt very, very satisfying to hold a piece of music where I’m like, “This is really great and literally nobody’s heard it.” I factually know nobody’s heard it because it’s not out yet. That was something that was really fulfilling for me. I don’t like doing it anymore because it’s a lot of work, but that’s what really got me into thinking DIY was really cool with my own sense of satisfaction.

With your background in self-recording and running a label, has it been difficult to hand over the reins for production and promotion with Stay Golden?

WOLF: I’ve always had a very, very hard time when there’s something about my band that I’m not in full control over. [Counter Intuitive Records] is doing a really, really excellent job, but we don’t have a manager right now. The idea of a manager freaks me out, because I’ve always wanted to have the interactions with people. I’ve always wanted to be the person doing merch so that if somebody comes up and is like, “I only have $10,” I can be the person to sell them a shirt and not like have one of my bandmates be like, “Uh, what should I do?” or say no. But they’ve been doing a really excellent job with publicity and posting about things and telling me things I need to do. I’ve still not updated our Apple Music page, but I wouldn’t have known I had to do that because I don’t use Apple Music.

Was there an intention from the beginning to make the “big, conceptual second album” a la The Monitor or Cosmic Thrill Seekers, or is that just how the songs presented themselves?

WOLF: I definitely wrote the single “Stay Golden” with the idea of, “There’s also going to be an album called that, and this is going to be the title track, and this is going to be the first song.” But I didn’t really have a scope of how big or how small the concept would be. There were definitely points along the way where I was like, “Oh, this is going to be a straight-up rock opera.” And I’m really glad I didn’t do that.

What were some of the rock opera ideas that didn’t make the cut?

WOLF: There was gonna be a deluxe version of the album that had every single indulgent thing we wanted to do. This was before I finished writing it, it was going to be multiple hours long with lots of interlude tracks where this troll would come up to you with stampering sounds, like, “I’m the Gold Troll!” This would be like the really stupid version that nobody would listen to. There was also going to be a big band version of “Stay Golden” that was all MIDI and the intro had spoken word on it. Because there’s a James Brown song that I think is called “World,” maybe I’m wrong, but it’s like a huge instrumental where one of the members of his band’s like, “James Brown, world of music,” and tells the story of the band.

So I gotta ask, Vacation, Cosmic Thrill Seekers, or The Monitor – which is your favorite concept album?

WOLF: Oh, it’s definitely Vacation — I can point to multiple parts of the record where I very deliberately was like, “I want to do this thing.” Particularly pacing, so the B side is kind of modeled after it. Between Vacation and The Monitor it’s like, really fucking close. But it is Vacation.

Stay Golden is out 8/16 on Counter Intuitive.