Thirteen years ago, Pleasant Thoughts singer/guitarist John Langan played his last show. At the time he was the frontman for rising Brooklyn-based punk band The Motorcycle Industry, but after four years in New York he was leaving the band and moving back home to California to get a real job.

As he navigated early adulthood on the West Coast, he found himself continuing to write songs, even though he no longer had a band to play them with. Major life events came and went - career changes, marriage, kids, a global pandemic - and the songs kept flowing. By the winter of 2021 things had reached a boiling point. Langan realized that over the course of the last decade he had slowly written an entire album. That’s when he reached out to his closest musical companions, Brooks Plummer and Mike Weiss, with the age old question: “What do you guys think? Is this any good?”

For Plummer and Weiss, it was the email they had been waiting for. Excited by what they heard, the three friends immediately began sending Garageband files back and forth across the country, fleshing out the acoustic demos Langan had sent and transforming them into loud, exuberant, full-fledged power pop songs. After a full year of long distance collaboration, they convened at ’64 Sound in Los Angeles with drummer/multi-instrumentalist Brendan Walter to turn their piecemeal demos into a real record.

The resulting album, Second Holy Communion, is a gut punch. It’s a decade of living packed into a blistering 26 minutes of music. Opening track “Recession Obsession” is not only the first song written for the record - originally penned back in 2011 immediately following Langan’s move back to the West Coast - it also serves as a metaphor for the band. Beginning with just Langan and his guitar, the other instruments are added to the mix one by one until everything finally bursts at the seams as the full band kicks into a searing guitar solo. It doesn’t let up from there, as the next four songs are propulsive, pounding, punk rock rippers, all written, as Langan puts it, “during an especially challenging period when my wife and I temporarily relocated from Southern California back to where I grew up in the Bay Area. That move really did not work out and left me super disillusioned with trying to find a place to call home.”

That feeling of disenchantment informs much of Second Holy Communion, but for Langan, what’s more important is how he’s learned to deal with it. “The biggest thing I tried to do with this album, unlike most of the stuff I've written in the past, is to try to offer solutions to the things I'm complaining about,” he says. “You can complain and complain, which I’m definitely guilty of - but at some point you need to deal with those problems.”

Over the course of the album’s ten songs Langan takes stock of everything he’s been through in the thirteen years since that last Brooklyn show - getting married, starting a family, brutal daily commutes to a job he hated and refused to be defined by, a panic attack at a roller skating rink - and comes to terms with where he’s ended up. “A lot of the album is about trying to reconcile the version of my life that I imagined as a kid with the reality of what adult life actually throws at you,” Langan says. In lines such as “I dream of the day where I wake up and say ‘I deserve what I got, and it’s all that I want’” and “I want to forgive myself for what I will not achieve” from the title track, “Second Holy Communion” - a song he calls the “thesis of the album” - he’s discovering that even though the life he’s living now is different than the one he may have once imagined for himself, the person he’s actually become and the life he actually leads are more than enough.

With that realization comes a feeling that’s new to Langan’s songwriting: gratitude. It shows up most clearly in the last song he wrote for the album, 2022’s “Fire Mountain Liquor”. The track serves as a breath of fresh air for Langan lyrically, and, being the lone acoustic song on the record, it’s also the only time Second Holy Communion pauses to take a breath. It’s a song he says he wrote, along with closing track, “Someone Else’s Band”, “as a way to say thank you to my wife for all of the incredible support she's given me in my life.” That sense of support from those around him is also something Langan has learned not to take for granted, acknowledging on “Someone Else’s Band” that when it comes to dealing with the problems life throws at you, “there’s no sense in facing this all alone”.

That sentiment goes for the band as well. “I never thought I would be in a band again and never thought I would release these songs,” Langan says of Second Holy Communion. If this record proves anything it’s that Pleasant Thoughts, while definitely Langan’s brainchild, is a collaborative effort. “Music has always been about companionship for me,” he says, something he values even more after “facing the same isolation we all were during the pandemic.” As for how his outlook has changed in the thirteen years since he was last on a stage? “For me, it’s about accepting that not everything in life is going to be part of some idealized, perfectionist vision that I once had. And even though that's true, I need to acknowledge the amazing things that I do have in my life. Now this band is another one of those things.”