As It Is

An advert on Join My Band

As It Is began with a classified ad. Patrick Walters, born in Minnesota and living in Brighton, posted on Join My Band in the spring of 2012 looking for people to play pop-punk with. Andrew Westhead and Patrick Foley answered it; Benjamin Langford-Biss, whom Walters knew from university, completed the line-up. The name was lifted from a Have Heart lyric, a straight-edge hardcore reference sitting oddly on a band who would spend the next decade writing choruses built to be sung back at them. Alistair Testo joined on bass in early 2014.

The climb was quick and conventional for the era: EPs, UK and European touring, then a deal. In October 2014 they became the first British band signed to Fearless Records, the Californian label that had spent a decade exporting American pop-punk. The debut, Never Happy, Ever After, arrived on 20 April 2015, produced by James Paul Wisner, and reached number 39 in the UK and 159 on the Billboard 200. They played every date of the 2015 Warped Tour and appeared at Reading and Leeds. By the band's own later accounting, that period ran to roughly 200 shows a year, which is a great deal of driving and not much talking.

Four albums, and a slow unravelling

The second record, okay., came on 20 January 2017 and sharpened what the debut had sketched. Westhead left that October, citing feelings and differences that had been building. The Great Depression followed on 10 August 2018 and pushed the band somewhere darker and more theatrical than the sunlit template they had been handed; it reached 29 in the UK and 198 in the US. In November 2018 they contributed a cover of "Such Great Heights" to Hopeless Records' Songs That Saved My Life compilation.

Then the line-up came apart in instalments. Langford-Biss announced his departure on 9 September 2019. Foley left on 29 December 2020 to train as a firefighter. What remained was a trio, which released "IDGAF" on 27 May 2021 and then the fourth album, I Went to Hell and Back, on 4 February 2022 via Fearless. Testo departed that August. The band played Reading and Leeds in 2022 as a three-piece, and those turned out to be the last shows for some time.

The stop

In January 2024 Walters announced an indefinite break, framing it as "It's never goodbye. It's just 'see you around'." The public version was a band winding down. The version the members have given since is blunter. Speaking to Rock Sound around the new album, Langford-Biss put the motive for getting back in touch in one line: "Patty was in a really bad place. I wanted my friend back."

What followed was not a business decision. The four went through personal therapy before any of them went near a song, and when they did reconvene the brief was explicitly the relationship rather than the catalogue. "The most immediate thing we wanted to come back to was just the friendship and the brotherhood," Walters said. Langford-Biss described the writing conditions as the opposite of everything that preceded them: "There were no time restrictions. The only ones were on ourselves."

Four names back on the same record

The original line-up announced its reunion on 2 September 2024. The first product was a backwards glance: Never Happy, Ever After X, a re-recording of the debut with guest features, released on 18 April 2025. New material came on 10 September 2025 with "Lose Your Way & Find Yourself", the first song the four wrote together after the break, issued alongside a move from Fearless to the label FLG.

"Ruin My Life" arrived on 7 January 2026 with Murray Macleod of The Xcerts guesting, and the album was announced days later for 17 July. Walters called the single "a reckless love song about the band and all we've been through together — a celebration of getting back together and a nod to all the mistakes we made along the way". Three more singles preceded the record: "Marilyn" on 12 March, "Do You Remember" on 7 May and "Live, Laugh, Love, Los Angeles" on 6 June.

The finished album runs to twelve tracks and is the first full-length written by Walters, Langford-Biss, Testo and Foley as a unit since The Great Depression in 2018 — eight years. Walters' summary of it, given to Rock Sound for issue 319, was unhedged: "This is the proudest I have ever been of a body of work I have created."

What the reviews made of it

The consensus is that the record splits cleanly in half, and that critics disagree about whether the second half is a rest or a sag. Distorted Sound gave it 7/10, describing a bright, horn-flecked opening stretch — "I'm So Alive!", "Ruin My Life", "Live, Laugh, Love, Los Angeles" — giving way to acoustic guitar and piano arrangements about loneliness, with Max Helyer of You Me At Six among the contributors. Its one real complaint was that the brass should have been used harder.

Hardbeat read the album as a document about friendship above anything else, singling out the line in "Lose Your Way & Find Yourself" — "I never felt so brave, that January day I asked for help" — and noting that "Live, Laugh, Love, Los Angeles" reaches for Springsteen while talking about gun violence and inequality. It also found the momentum dropping in the back half, with the stripped-back "Not Anymore" functioning as respite rather than climax.

The dissent came from The Soundboard, which argued the record chases several incompatible goals without committing to any of them, called the production fluffy and edgeless towards the end, and named the closer "What If It All Works Out" as the dud — an emotional resolution it felt the album had not earned. The counter-argument, which Walters has made in interviews, is that the closer is the point: "What if we believed in ourselves? What if we believed in each other?"

Back on the road, at twenty quid a ticket

The live return started before the album did. On Saturday 13 June 2026 they played the Avalanche Stage at Download, their first Donington appearance in over nine years, taking a mid-afternoon lull and turning it round with "Ruin My Life", "Hey Rachel", "The Stigma (Boys Don't Cry)" and "Dial Tones". Distorted Sound scored the set 7/10.

Four days later, on 17 June, the band announced a UK headline tour with Greywind supporting, tickets flat-priced at £20 across every show and on sale from 10am on 19 June. It opened at Burn It Down Festival in Torquay on 3 September and has since worked through Wolverhampton, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Norwich, Sheffield, Hull, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Belfast. The remaining dates are Dublin's Academy on 16 September, Bootleg Social in Blackpool on the 18th, O2 Academy2 Oxford on the 19th, Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff on the 20th, The Forum in Tunbridge Wells on the 22nd and the Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea on the 23rd. Beyond that the diary already has Takedown Festival in Portsmouth in April 2027.