Paper Money has had the same five members for two decades, which in the math of band longevity is somewhere between unusual and statistically improbable. Vocalist Tim Sussman, guitarist and producer Carlo Colasacco, keyboardist Marco Colasacco, bassist Stephen Lemos, and drummer Ryan Harte grew up in the same North Jersey scene, went to the same shows, and wore out a lot of the same records. Most bands don't make it five years. These five are closing in on twenty, and nobody seems to be going anywhere.

That kind of staying power tends to get attributed to passion or chemistry, but talking to Paper Money, the explanation is more straightforward: they genuinely like each other. The Colasacco brothers, Carlo and Marco, founded the band alongside their childhood friend Stephen Lemos in high school. Sussman joined in 2006, after his own band opened for them at a cafe in South Orange. Harte came in around the same time, recruited through a mutual friend at an ice rink on what was supposed to be a one-show arrangement. That was nearly twenty years ago.

The band recorded and performed for years as Someone Say Something before quietly becoming Paper Money in 2024, a rename that came with a real creative gear shift. Carlo has been writing songs since he was six years old, taught by his father, and had his first song recorded by the time he was eight. He broke into the industry without much of a safety net, grinding through Los Angeles and taking every meeting he could get, before eventually establishing himself as one of the more quietly prolific songwriters working today. His credits include co-writing Shinedown's "State of My Head," a six-week number one on the Billboard Rock chart, along with work alongside Skillet, Dashboard Confessional, Jon Bellion, Julia Michaels, and LIT, and many more. That experience is what he brings to the band's recordings. Now based in Nashville, he produces and engineers while the rest of the band makes regular trips from New Jersey to his studio in Tennessee. The sessions are intensive and fast-moving: the five of them arrive with rough material, spend a few days tearing it apart and rebuilding it together, and leave with finished tracks. It works because they've been doing some version of this for two decades and don't need to spend any time figuring each other out.

The music lands in the 90s pop-rock pocket that shaped all of them growing up in New Jersey, Blink-182 being the most honest reference point, filtered through Carlo's production sensibility into something that sounds current without chasing anything. Live, Paper Money is high energy and sonically precise. The band cares as much about how they sound in a room as they do on a record, and it shows. They've played Bamboozle's main stage and shared festival billing with My Chemical Romance, Paramore, and Boys Like Girls. In their most active stretch, they logged over 100 shows in a single year, the kind of road work that either breaks a band or welds it together. For Paper Money it was clearly the latter.

Their new single, "Pretty Faces," is out April 10th, followed by an EP this summer.