The Next Big Thing! Taking Back Sunday

Adam Lazzara’s modest Brooklyn apartment hasn’t seen a vacuum cleaner in some time, and for good reason. The Taking Back Sunday frontman has been in the U.K. promoting his band’s second CD, Where You Want to Be. Upon his return, going to bars — many, many bars — superseded cleaning house. With a look that suggests a bomb is going off inside his head, the High Point, North Carolina, native surveys Blender with mild anxiety.

“Oh, hi,” he croaks. “It’s…you know…um?” A hand comes up to his mouth to catch an abrasive cough. “Sorry. It’s the, the hangover.”

Eyes hiding behind lank hair, the frontman eases into a sofa and forces a smile. “Sorry,” he says again.If Lazzara, 22, seems the apologetic type — and he is, begging forgiveness for almost everything today — his band, which formed in New York five years ago, is mercifully more assertive. Their blistering 2002 debut, Tell All Your Friends, suggested that they were a genuine post-grunge rock force. The five-piece, all in their mid-twenties, spent their tortured adolescent years dreaming of replacing geekdom with stardom, but the big time didn’t suit original members Shaun Cooper (bass) and John Nolan (guitar), both of whom quit as the record notched its 350,000th sale.

“No, I don’t hate those guys,” Lazzara says, shrugging, “but I did think it was the end of us.”

Instead, Taking Back Sunday enlisted new members and, he insists, became a better band. Their new album is like a more tuneful Metallica, with bruising rock anthems that hint at paranoia, loathing and despair. Surprisingly, then, given the band’s dark temperament, they’ve been touring with pop-punkers Blink-182.

“But we don’t make boobie music like those guys,” Lazzara says.