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Black Lines is the fifth studio album by American rock band Mayday Parade. Recording was done between March and May 2015 with producer Mike Sapone in New York. "Keep in Mind, Transmorgrification Is a New Technology" was released as a single in July. "Letting Go" was released as a single in October with the album, released through Fearless, following shortly after. The album charted at number 21 in the U.S.

Mayday Parade released their fourth album, Monsters in the Closet in October 2013. While touring in support of that release, vocalist Derek Sanders thought the group was "beginning to become too predictable". He mentioned Monsters in the Closest as sounding "very similar" to their past material. A view also shared by the band's guitarist, Alex Garcia. For the follow-up album, Sanders "really wanted [it] to feel like something different." A turning point for the band came when they recorded a cover of the Bush song "Comedown" for the Punk Goes 90s Vol. 2 (2014) compilation album. The band tackled the song differently from their other recordings, recording it live-in-the-studio. Sanders thought this was "a much rawer way of recording" that the band haven't previously done.

While the group, according to Garcia, "experiment[ed] with co-writers" in the past, they wanted to "become more internal", writing all of the songs on Black Lines by themselves.Kerrang! writer Paul Travers noted that while the band's past works were collections of pop rock songs, Black Lines had "a rawer, grittier sound with a more dynamic approach" to song structures. The album's sound has been described as emo,emo pop,pop punk and rock. "One of Them Will Destroy the Other" features guest vocals from Real Friends' vocalist Dan Lambton. "Letting Go" is about "self pity and not having the strength to get over a bad relationship. It's about that weird spot when someone breaks you down even though you know they're toxic."

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