Punk rocker
Back to the turn of the millennium with Blink-182
Mark Hoppus, bassist and singer of the band “Blink-182”, at the Hurricane music festival. photo
© Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
With their new record “One More Time”, the skate punk rockers Blink-182 look back on the time of their greatest successes. Many will also rediscover echoes of their own lives in it.
A little wistful, but undefeated: The skate punk rockers Blink-182 are releasing their new record “One More Time”, the first new album with their classic line-up since 2011. It is a journey into the emotional world of the time of their great successes in the late years 90s and early noughties.
The band from Poway, California, with bassist and singer Mark Hoppus (51), drummer Travis Barker (47) and guitarist and singer Tom DeLonge (47), who has returned after a year-long absence, is releasing the record in the middle of a world tour. This most recently took them to Manchester, and this weekend they are on stage in Las Vegas.
Return to the original
Although Blink-182 has enjoyed success in recent years with Matt Skiba, who stood in for DeLonge between 2015 and 2022, and released two studio albums (“California” and “Nine”), it feels like a return to the original.
With “One More Time” the three punk rock veterans take their fans on a tour through the emotional world of a not so distant and yet irretrievable past. “When We Were Young”, “Fell in Love”, “One More Time” are pieces that evoke the young attitude to life of the late 90s and early noughties. A lightheartedness that has now given way to concerns about climate change, war and insecurity – and the fact that the youth of that time are now middle-aged.
Looking back at strokes of fate
But it’s not a nostalgic record. Blink-182 are no longer the guys from the skate park and they don’t try to give that impression, that’s clear from the deep songs. They are men with scars who also look back on strokes of fate such as Hoppus’ cancer in 2021 and Barker’s flight accident in 2008, which he survived with serious injuries. They allude to both events in the title song “One More Time” with the line: “I wish they told us, it shouldn’t take a sickness or airplanes falling out of the sky.”
Musically the album is diverse. Fast-paced beats and soulful songs alternate. They prove right from the start that they can still let it rip with “Anthem” and the rowdy “Shut Up”. And despite everything, they don’t want to be completely grown up: At the beginning of the party song “Dance With Me” you can hear the sentence: “When I teach masturbation, I always say: ‘Have fun with it’.”