For most of the 2010s it looked like The All-American Rejects might stop at four albums. Kids in the Street came out in 2012 and then nothing, and the band said on the record more than once that they weren't sure another full-length would ever happen. What changed things was the road. The 2023 Wet Hot All-American Summer Tour was their first proper headline run in over a decade, and by the band's own account it quietly sold out rooms around the country. Two years later they went back further, to the way they started out in Stillwater, Oklahoma: playing backyards. The 2025 House Party Tour put free, self-funded pop-up shows at USC, in a cornfield and outside a house in East Nashville, and the phone videos did the rest.
Sandbox came out of that. Released May 15, 2026, it's the fifth Rejects album, the first in 14 years and the first they've made without a label, recorded at their own pace over roughly 18 months, with the title track, "Easy Come, Easy Go," "Search Party!" and "Eggshell Tap Dancer" trickling out ahead of it. The lineup is the long-running one: Tyson Ritter on vocals and bass, Nick Wheeler and Mike Kennerty on guitars, Chris Gaylor on drums. Move Along, the 2005 album that carried "Dirty Little Secret," went double platinum within a year, according to the band's own milestone list.