Fourteen years passed between Plow United records. Fourteen years is a long time. Brian, Joel and Sean spent those 14 years moving restlessly–and separately–around the country and the world, sometimes keeping in touch, sometimes not, sometimes playing music, sometimes not.

But throughout that time, the memories were there: pushing, pulling, guiding. Memories of lessons learned, reminders of scars borne, and the occasional unearthing of an old record while moving from place to place all brought the past to present. And, at the same time, the songs, long out-of-print, were winding their way from person to person and town to town in disembodied, digital form.

The songs on Marching Band are direct responses to the frenetic energy that resurfaced when Plow United took to a stage again in 2011. if you listen carefully, you can almost hear Plow United (circa 1996) performing these tracks. However, one thing Plow circa '96 could not have accounted for is time: these songs are the product of an extra 42 years added to three lives. The old Plow United songs were about wanting to be recognized as adults, or about realizing all the things you'd been told about life and how to live it were wrong, and being fucking pissed about it. The new Plow United songs – the ones on Marching Band – are about not giving in to cynicism, about not lowering expectations, about not giving up hope, even when giving up hope seems like the sensible thing to do.

They say that the first album is the easiest to write. You have your whole lives to write the first album. Subsequent ones have to be cranked out in a year or two. Marching Band is the first Plow United record in over a decade, and in a way that means the band has the chance to make a first album all over again, with all that time and all those new experiences from which to draw, not to mention all those half-finished songs, lyrical snippets jotted down but never completed, songs written for other projects that fizzled out before their time.

From the boundless joy of "Human 2000" - the band's ode to its audience - to the rage, frustration and teeth-gritting determination of "Falling, Deeply", to the raucous affection of "Get Low," it's clear that Plow United has expanded their reach without dulling their edge. Marching Band isn't a comeback. It's a never-left.