Firestone Elementary disappeared for two decades and came back because teenagers started finding them. The five friends from Painesville, Ohio made their version of emo and post-hardcore in the early 2000s, released “Apologies and Instincts” in 2006, then got on with jobs, families and the rest of adult life. In 2026, that old record started moving again online, the same five people began writing new songs, and on September 18 they released their second comeback single, “The Little Things“.
And yes, if seeing the word MySpace just made some long-retired side fringe try to crawl back across your forehead, you are probably the right age for this one.
Firestone Elementary’s first audience came through printed posters, college radio, other local bands, MySpace pages and burnt CDs left on tables in the mall food court.
Now kids who were not alive when the album came out are finding it through TikTok, then asking the band where they can buy the CD.
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That whole process started quietly. Jon Porostosky had pressed “Apologies and Instincts” on vinyl for its anniversary, mainly for the band and people who remembered them. Justin Waite had also uploaded the record to Spotify and Apple Music through the DistroKid account he had been using with Pharmacy Keys. For about a year it sat at 10 or 15 streams a day.
Then January 2026 arrived. The numbers went to 100, 200, then 300, 400, 500 and 600 streams a day on Spotify. Jon put one vinyl copy on eBay, sold it to a listener named Cyrus and asked how he had found a band that had been inactive for twenty years.
TikTok.
@justin.waite8 This is from 2006… and yall found it! New song coming soon 👀 #newmusic #indiemusic #unsignedartist #firestoneelementary #fyp ♬ original sound – JW8
Neither Jon nor Justin was really using it. They searched Firestone Elementary and found younger listeners singing along to the record, skating to it and posting the old artwork. People started asking for CDs, T-shirts, posters and keychains. The band still had around 100 CDs from the original run. They sold them, repressed the disc and sold those too.
Justin remembers the previous internet very differently.
“It was very ‘community’ driven vs. some algorythim feeding you something. So I remember seeing a lot of the same stuff from the same bands (which ws cool because you got to see them grow, you felt more invested in everyone’s sucess) and the way you learned of a new band, was from another band or fan talking about them, it certaintly felt more welcoming and human back then.”
The Firestone Elementary MySpace page carried songs as they recorded them, photos and show dates. Stream counts were visible, though Justin does not remember anyone treating them as terribly important. MySpace also sat next to AOL Instant Messenger in daily life.
“Stream counts were posted, but I don’t think anyone really cared about that. It was more like, oh sweet, I can stream this song while I chat on AOL instant messenger. haha”
Mostly, they used the site to find bands and shows. Justin thinks somebody discovered them there and booked them at Peabody’s in Cleveland. There is still footage online, grainy and square, exactly how a mid-2000s local-show video should look.
Before MySpace, there were high-school bands. Jon, Jeremy Newton-Smith, Adam Perkins, Justin and Nathan “Nate” Thompson all grew up around Painesville and attended Riverside High School. Jeremy, Adam and Justin played in Civil Funk, with Jon appearing with them. Nate played in The Earmuffs, where Justin also made appearances.
By late 2004, Justin and Jeremy were studying at Youngstown State University. Adam was at Kent State, and Jon was travelling down with him for practices. Nate transferred to Youngstown State and started hanging around while the other four worked on songs. He liked what he heard and asked if he could join.
They were in their early twenties. Jon sang, Jeremy played lead guitar, Nate played rhythm guitar, Justin played bass and Adam played drums. Their first three songs were “Go Ahead, Take It”, “Your Intentions Are Pending” and “A World of Waiting”. All three later appeared on “Apologies and Instincts”.
Justin, Nate and Jeremy rented a house in Boardman called Mellow Yellow. Justin and Nate worked at Pacific Sunwear. Jeremy worked at Euro Gyro. They threw parties with people from the mall, while Adam commuted from Kent with Jon each week to practise.
Shows followed their college lives. They played Kent State, The Robinhood, Club Chameleon and the Rathskeller. A second-place finish in a battle of the bands there meant they narrowly missed opening for Muse at Kent State’s Black Squirrel Festival. Black Squirrel Radio had them on to talk about their songs and upcoming gigs.
Around Youngstown they played places including Nyabinghi and Cedar’s Lounge. Touring bands passing through Nyabinghi were sometimes invited back to Mellow Yellow, where a free shower was useful if you had been living in a van. Firestone Elementary also opened for Cherry Monroe at what was then called the Chevy Center, now the Covelli Center.
The first run faded after college. There was no grand final fight or dramatic break-up.
“Essentially life happened. We finished school, and Plan A (becoming a touring act) became Plan B, and Plan B (getting a real job) became plan A.”
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They married, had children and built careers. The friendships stayed. Families met up, went away together and kept talking about the old days. Everybody carried on playing in some form, learned other instruments and kept notebooks or demos around.
In 2019, Justin, Adam, Jeremy and Nate started Pharmacy Keys with Dave Moran, an original member of The Earmuffs. Dave had a catalogue of indie-rock songs and the other four became his backing band. They recorded two albums, “Conjuress” and “Queen Maybe”, over the following three years.
The pandemic changed how they worked. Voice notes, SoundCloud links and files bounced around online because they could not always be together. That habit stayed.
By the time the old Firestone record started picking up listeners, Justin already had a home studio and everyone knew how to move a half-written song around without scheduling a full-band practice.
The new Firestone Elementary also turned out to contain the original five members with a few instrument changes. Jon is still on vocals and Jeremy is still on guitar. Justin moved from bass to drums, his original instrument growing up. Adam moved from drums to guitar. Nate went from guitar to bass, which he had played in The Earmuffs.
Nobody seems too protective about whose instrument is whose. If a part works, somebody plays it.
Justin describes the band as vocal-driven, with Jon sitting prominently in the mixes. Their shared love of hip-hop is part of that. Justin and Jon grew up listening heavily to 2Pac, Wu-Tang Clan and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, music where a lot of words have to sit clearly over a track.
That gives the upcoming EP plenty of room. Their idea is simple enough: change the instrumentation, tuning or BPM as much as they want and trust Jon’s voice to keep the band recognisable.
“write with whatever instrumention, in whatever tuning, at whatever BPM you want… Jon will have it sounding like Firestone.”
The first new song began in the group text. After watching people buy the remaining CDs, Justin joked that they should write and record something new. The others essentially answered, “bet”.
He already had an idea that did not fit Pharmacy Keys. He recorded the verses and choruses as a voice note and sent it around. Jon started on the lyrics.
That became “My Never Goodbye“.
Justin’s starting point for the words was relationships. He told Jon he wanted a song about good people being worth fighting for even when relationships get difficult. As the band started recording and the new audience kept showing up, the song picked up another association for them. They began talking about it as a love letter to the people who had found Firestone Elementary again.
Jon, Justin and Nate worked out the full arrangement in Justin’s home studio with Jon singing through a live PA, Justin on drums and Nate on guitar. The song still needed a bridge. Justin came up with one after a short rehearsal break, and they sent a final voice note to Adam and Jeremy.
Then baseball interfered. Justin broke his finger while throwing batting practice to his oldest son and ended up in a splint. Nate learned Justin’s rhythm-guitar part straight from the original voice note and recorded it himself. Justin tracked drums, then Nate recorded bass.
Jon was supposed to record a scratch vocal so Jeremy and Adam could hear where his lines sat while writing their lead parts. Nate and Justin listened from the room while Justin engineered the session.
Nate and Justin looked at each other. The scratch vocal was staying.
Jon asked whether he should redo it. They laughed and told him no.
Justin added harmonies and scream tracks. Jeremy later recorded a lead for the second half of the verses with what Justin calls his familiar “16 bit Sega Genesis rhythmic flow”. Adam, who had played drums in the original version of Firestone Elementary, came in with the chorus guitar part.
When Jeremy and Adam first heard the version with the vocals in place, their reaction was: “Are you guys sure it needs anymore?”
The home-studio photo from those sessions has Adam on the left recording his chorus lead and Justin on the right engineering. Jeremy Newton-Smith took the picture. Justin called the room “chaotic yet peaceful at the same time.”
Justin recorded, mixed and produced “My Never Goodbye”. Adam Boose at Cauliflower Audio in Cleveland mastered it. The same pair handled those jobs on “The Little Things”.
“The Little Things” began during a very different part of Justin’s day. He keeps a cheap acoustic guitar around and picks it up between conference calls, quarterly business reviews and revenue forecast modelling. One of those in-between riffs became the verse.
He wanted a quicker song after “My Never Goodbye”, which sat closer to the slower side of old Firestone Elementary. Much of their earlier writing was faster and punkier. “The Little Things” went through a couple of versions, then the verse, chorus and bridge came together quickly.
They added a post-chorus with Blink-182 in mind. Electronic parts went in too. The opening came from something Pharmacy Keys had taught Justin about getting to a hook quickly.
The heavier section drew on something he had always liked about Underoath, especially Chris Dudley’s synths sitting behind distorted guitars.
“Not many people think about this or even know, but Chris Dudley wasn’t just headbanging behind that keyboard rack. He was adding some really intense synth layers behind the distored guitars to lift those sections.”
Justin played synth and keys himself. The parts he came up with reminded him of the eerie music from old episodes of “Unsolved Mysteries”, the sort of thing that made sleeping with the light on seem reasonable for a few nights.
Jon started writing as soon as he heard the melody. He wanted the song to be about somebody under stress and the simple act of checking whether they are OK.
The opening lines are: ” Maybe I wanted to tell you, everything I wanted to say, Maybe I wanted to look you in the eyes, see if you’re okay”.
“I wanted to write a song about someone going through a stressful time, which is something a lot of people can relate to when dealing with stress and anxiety.”
The line he comes back to is: “I hope that you can find the little things that make you happy”.
“It’s so important to check up on friends and family when you feel like they might be struggling.”
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The cover shows Justin’s teenage daughter Raegan Welch asleep in bed. His wife, Jen Waite, took the photograph. Jon handled the design.
Justin was nervous about asking Raegan whether she was comfortable appearing on the cover. He expected the answer a teenager might reasonably give when her dad wants to turn a random sleeping photo into artwork for his old emo band.
She said, “I’d be honored.”
The family’s involvement has taken other strange forms. TikToks about Firestone Elementary now land on their children’s FYPs and get sent back to the band with, “did you see this?” Justin had to learn that FYP meant “for you page”, which he helpfully translates for “any other elder emo out there like me who didn’t know what that was”.
Messages from the younger audience include “Please don’t stop making music again” and “please come play in Scotland”. People ask to have CDs autographed before the band posts them out. A fan also made a cassette edition, one copy for each member and another for himself.
“Really? You want the CD instead of the vinyl?”
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Justin collects vinyl from bands of that period himself, so the CD requests were the bit he did not expect. He thinks the difficulty of finding original copies of “Apologies and Instincts” helped people become curious. Reddit threads appeared around the band and the artwork. Listeners asked each other whether anybody knew who Firestone Elementary were.
The cover art gave them another way in. Jon had originally drawn its characters with a children’s book in mind. He and Eric Campbell share credit for the drawings. The image comes from the lyrics to “Your Intentions Are Pending”, with the boy receiving his heart in exchange for wings torn from the girl.
Jon scanned the drawings, coloured them digitally in Photoshop and laid out the album. Justin remembers choosing the track-list font on the back. New listeners now send the band their own drawings of those characters, and some have ended up on stickers and merch.
Their older influences have also stayed close. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Beach Boys came through their parents. Adam was a huge Kiss fan and loved 1980s hair metal. In high school and college, the five found common ground in Deftones, Thrice, The Used and Underoath. Then came labels including Tooth & Nail, Vagrant, Drive–Thru and Epitaph, where following one band led to another.
Justin’s interest has since gone deeper into the recording side. While working on “The Little Things”, he looked into techniques associated with Andy Wallace and bought an old Yamaha SPX90II effects unit. He used it while experimenting with chorus bass, detuned chorus vocals and a reverse gate on the snare, drawing from production approaches he associates with early Nirvana records.
At twenty, the technical research could be considerably simpler. Justin’s own description involves “ripping a Boss Metal Zone into a solid state Crate amplifer.”
The internet has also given him several versions of the same generational loop happening around other bands he loves.
Saosin come to mind first. Justin remembers seeing them at Warped Tour and thinking, “oh damn, who are these guys?!” Their self-titled album stayed in heavy rotation at home, and he has enjoyed seeing their recent activity.
Underoath never really disappeared, though their twentieth-anniversary run for “They’re Only Chasing Safety” was another one the band noticed. They were a huge influence on Firestone Elementary. Justin recently messaged Aaron Gillespie on TikTok about Firestone coming back, and Gillespie wrote back, saying it was “so awesome to hear” and talking about what the modern internet now makes possible.
Deftones give Justin an even more direct example. They have long been one of his personal top three bands. His daughter Raegan started hearing “Cherry Waves” in TikToks, then went back through a catalogue recorded years before she was listening. Justin took Raegan and his wife to see Deftones at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
For Firestone Elementary, those new listeners are scattered well beyond Ohio. Their biggest streaming pockets include Los Angeles, San Antonio, Phoenix and Dallas. People have asked them to play elsewhere, including Scotland.
Their lives are still in Ohio. A normal tour means working around children, careers, weekend baseball coaching and weekday board meetings.
Justin considers Cleveland an excellent arts city with an active music community and points to acts including Mushroomhead, The Lighthouse and Whaler, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and MGK. His memory of the early-2000s years is that emo, screamo and post-hardcore had a stronger home around Youngstown and Pittsburgh than Cleveland itself.
Spotify and Apple Music now put Firestone Elementary in front of listeners wherever those pockets happen to be. A local show is possible. Recording comes first.
Birdface Records handles the releases. Justin started it before Pharmacy Keys put their records out and runs it alone. At the moment it is a small production and marketing operation for Pharmacy Keys and Firestone Elementary, with its own social presence. He would eventually like to use it to record other bands and help them with DIY releases.
The next Firestone Elementary EP is planned for spring 2027. “Light the Torches” is among the songs being recorded, with Nate due to track bass. The band have talked about letting the EP move through softer singer-songwriter writing, nu metal, emo and post-hardcore.
The five current members are still the five people who started this together: Jon Porostosky on vocals, Jeremy Newton-Smith on guitar, Justin Waite now on drums, Adam Perkins now on guitar and Nate Thompson now on bass. The current band photograph was taken by Jen Newton-Smith. Brett Campbell shot the supplied photos from 2005. Jeremy shot the home-studio image from the “My Never Goodbye” sessions. The original “Apologies and Instincts” illustrations are by Jon Porostosky and Eric Campbell, with Jon handling the digital colour and layout.
Twenty years ago, they were leaving burnt CDs in a mall and hoping somebody would pick one up. Now they are repressing those same CDs because teenagers keep asking for them.
The definition of success has changed too.
“I think success looks like writing, recording and releasing as many songs as possible with our best friends. We’re writing songs we would like to listen to, if someone else digs it, great.”
The audience helps. Justin calls it “gasoline on the fire”. The five also have children who now play wiffleball together in the backyard.
“We’re thrilled people found us and we have an audience that cares.. that’s gasoline on the fire. Ultimately though, we know, as we learned during the 20 years we were just ‘living our lives’ above all.. friendship is success.”
They still wonder what might have happened if Firestone Elementary had taken off the first time. Which cities they might have seen. Which bands they could have played with.
Then there is the thing none of their twenty-year-old selves would have guessed: kids roughly the age they were at Mellow Yellow are hearing “Apologies and Instincts” for the first time and sending it to their friends.
Justin already has a reason to keep making sure the new songs actually get recorded.
“If we’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s important to record these things, because someone 20 years from now might want to hear it.”
