HOW DID WE GET HERE: One More time - blink 182

As with everything else, the internet has ruined the act of teenage rebellion. Of course, you could make the argument that teenage rebellion has always been bad, with tattoos being disgusting, swearing being uncouth, and skateboards being evil - but most people who hold views like that in 2024 are either: old people, people who were home-schooled, or people who have the exact same vibe as someone who was home-schooled, and I refuse to acknowledge as an equal anyone who has ever referred to their dad as “sir”.

In the mid-2000s, teenagers such as myself could be found in dingy bedrooms, greasy hair staining HMV film posters, a Tenacious D album playing from the Xbox. If you heard footsteps on the stairs, you would frantically rush to skip the track titled “Cock Pushups”, before frantically coming back to it five minutes later when you were certain your mum had finally gone back to watching Peter Andre eat bugs on live television. You learned new swear words, developed new tastes, and realised that there was a world of music that went beyond Coldplay and Busted. The exploration was perverse but innocent, embarrassing but wholesome.

If a kid in 2023 wants to rebel against their parents, they have to choose between taking a machete to the cinema or listening to six hours of Jordan Peterson soft-selling fascism. Are you struggling with girls? Do they make you feel weird? Don’t listen to a fun song about how much first dates can suck, just go on 4chan and listen to a thousand losers insisting that your bone structure is a permanent social handicap. Your mum is pissing you off? Don’t listen to the song Dick Lips, which is about being grounded and doing chores. No, fuck that, instead you should watch thirty back-to-back TikToks of a chimp-faced sex trafficker explaining that your mum is actually a whore who will regret holding back such a high-value male from playing Fortnite dressed as Peter from Family Guy.

Rebellion used to be pretending you wanted to fuck dogs as a joke. Now it is Being a Nazi Online. But is this just it now, forever? Is this the permanent state of things for teenagers who feel like they don’t quite fit in?

Not if blink-182 can help it.

They’re back, they’re fifty years old, and they still want to fuck dogs. But is the charisma of some middle-aged men who haven’t known the teenage struggle since the early 90’s really going to be enough to turn the tide against Ben Shapiro and his legion of angry little cretins?

Probably not.

ANTHEM PART 3
You’ve gotta hand it to them on this opening track: the energy is all there. The guitar is as simple and loud as it has always been, and the drumming of Barker is as overly elaborate and dramatic as it has always been. It isn’t until you hear the first vocals of Tom Delonge that you can really tell it isn’t a classic blink track. The conversation about his changing voice got old over a decade ago, but it still really does jar you back to reality if you’re only used to listening to their older stuff. It’s not even bad really. There’s a Canadian band I like called Pup, and their lead vocalist was told by doctors that constant performing had completely ruined his vocal cords, with a warning about further harm potentially causing permanent damage to his ability to speak, never mind sing. Tom Delonge on this track sounds like he has just been told the same thing. Perhaps that’s why it’s just one more time.

DANCE WITH ME
When I teach masturbation, I’m always just like, “Have fun with it”

We have the first Classic! blink-182! Zinger!
Is it because it’s a joke I’ve heard before? Is it because I’m too old for masturbation jokes? Or is the joke not funny because the guy delivering it is old enough to be in position where teaching his kids to jack off isn’t entirely unfeasible? Who knows. But, either way, that first line is somehow not the worst writing on this track. That probably isn’t intentional, but it could arguably be very useful, as you really aren’t thinking about that shit joke anymore by the time you’ve heard the chorus four times.

Tellin' your friends you know you want to (dance with me)
Shaking those hips like the devil's got you (dance with me)
Waiting all night 'cause now I want you (dance with me)
Eyeing that chance, here we go, I got you (dance with me)
Olé, olé, olé, olé
Yeah, we're doing it all night long

It should be illegal for gringos to say olé outside of the context of football matches.

Bad, bad song.

FELL IN LOVE
Without checking with him, I know from the first ten seconds of this song that this is my brother Mark’s favourite from the album (he told me to do this review). The nostalgic guitar tones, the anthemic percussion, the stupid shitty lyrics.

How could I ever forget layin’ in your bed
Having sex all night, it’s fuckin’ with my head
Now we can never pretend that we can only be friends

This is such a bizarre song because it doesn’t sound like the writing of a band that has been together since a decade before 9/11. This sounds like a band that went small-time viral on TikTok in 2020 because some popular fifteen-year-old used it as the background song for a montage of them vaping in their bedroom.

This is a deep pull but, at times, FELL IN LOVE sounds a bit like 3OH!3, a band that I refuse to Google, but that I assume is now entirely incarcerated.

TERRIFIED
This song has a funny little GarageBand breakdown towards the end that I always appreciate a musician having a go at, purely for how transparent its existence is. There’s not much going on in this song, and the boys clearly noticed that and were like, fuck, we need to do something. So, they threw this brief cacophony of echoes and conflicting drum-tracks in right before the final chorus and called it a day. I respect that.

There isn’t much to say about the rest of the song. It’s fine, but like I say, there’s not really much here for me to work with. It’s like writing food criticism about a room temperature glass of water.

ONE MORE TIME
You can see why ONE MORE TIME was chosen as the title track, because it’s the first instance I’m aware of in which the original members of blink address, through song, their break-up, the events of the past two decades, and their recent reunion.
In that intervening time of hiatuses and stand-ins, they’ve each been struck by their own personal tragedies: Travis Barker’s plane crash in 2008, Mark Hoppus’ battle with cancer, and Tom Delonge’s abduction and eventual escape from alien custody. Each of the three friends have skirted the barrier between life and death, and in this song they question why it should take such events for people to reconnect, to tell their loved ones that they are their loved ones. From that angle, it’s a good song, and a nice song. I am happy that they are here, and I am happy that they’ve had the opportunity to make this album together.
From another, more honest angle, it’s shit.

MORE THAN YOU KNOW
Pop punk will never reclaim the teenage house party. The time was here, the time was good, the time has gone. That’s okay. In this track however, blink-182 could actually regain a teenage audience. It’s good! It’s a good song! Biting and fast and catchy, this could be the opening to a real heater of a record. I really hope the rest of this album is more like this.

TURN THIS OFF!
Ah, well.

There’s a line in this about being offended by the lyrics and it reminds me of how Mr Bean came out to complain about cancel culture in comedy. Like, shut up lol.         

This song feels like a warning shot. Rifles firing across the Berlin wall. Do I dare climb up? To take a little peak? It is my job. I am the bravest man alive.

WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
If you’re gonna do the thing where you suck at the teat of nostalgia, you better have something to say about it.

Are you still ridin’ free like every other?

What the fuck does that mean? What are you talking about? I shouldn’t have climbed the wall. I shouldn’t have been brave. The wall should stay up. A permanent 1988 please.

EDGING
In an alternate universe, there’s a Pop Punk theme park. You ride the Sugar We’re Going Down rollercoaster, you splash through the Ocean Avenue log flume, you are invited onto the tour bus of an animatronic Lostprophets. No, you may not leave.

Anyway, when you’re queuing for the rides at this theme park, EDGING is the song that’s being blasted out of the park speakers. It’s simple, it’s bouncy, it’s very, very bad.

As you leave the park, it occurs to you that you shouldn’t have yielded to documentary propaganda and changed your summer plans. You should have gone to Seaworld.
The orcas are there right now, doing their little jumps. They’re having a good time. They wish you would join them in the water. The water is very safe for you. But instead you’re here, and you aren’t sure exactly where you got the chlamydia from. And you have a lip piercing.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT
blink-182 are in a strange position. They’re a band that very obviously are in the twilight of their years together. The title of this album seems to imply it’s one last hurrah, and, if I’m honest, I can see why. The songs are coherent and well produced, yes, but they don’t have anything to them. There’s nothing inspiring or new or exciting about what they’re doing. So it makes sense that they’re probably at the end. But the strange thing is, they still have in their ranks one of the best drummers on the planet. It’s an utterly bizarre contrast. No matter what the slop is up front with the lyrics and the vocals and the bar chords, Travis is always in the back absolutely tearing it up. He’s a footballing legend coming back to his hometown club to Not Quite help them out of League One. He’s Einstein teaching secondary school maths. He’s Robert De Niro slumming it in Stardust.

He's there for the love of the game, and the love of his friends.

…He’s probably just a bored millionaire.

BLINK WAVE
Despite the wanky title this is actually one of the better tracks on the album. The chorus has some nice backing synth. It’s all a bit feathery and light and reminds me of Angels and Airwaves. In fact, I really want to listen to that band instead of carrying on with this.

But I must be brave.

BAD NEWS
Yes! I’ve been rewarded!

This is fun. Until they do the slow bit, which is bad, but the rest is fun! It feels a bit like their classic stuff and that’s about as much as you can ask for really, given their affliction (old).

This song is about falling out of love with someone after many years together and I was thinking about whether or not this is actually based on someone in the band and then I was thinking about each of their marriages and then I realised that the Kardashians would probably have listened to their brother in laws new album when it was released. I wonder if any of them haven’t listened to it yet. I wonder if they’ll Google a nice, fun, easy reading review of it instead so that they can pretend to have listened.

I wonder if a girl from Hollywood could make time for a boy from Bulwell.

I wonder if this is love.

(I DON’T CARE WHICH ONE YOU ARE AS LONG AS YOU HAVE ACCESS TO ‘THE MONEY)

HURT (INTERLUDE)
I am not contractually obligated to listen to interludes.

TURPENTINE
I’m getting to that point where I keep wanting to check how many songs are left in the album. I get that it’s probably their last one so there’s no point leaving anything at home but I think so far I could have edited this down to a really decent four track album.

At least this one has lines about doing drugs, jacking off, and fucking your (my?) mom.

Another song where the chorus is actually pretty fun but the rest is actually pretty not fun. And you have to listen to the other parts to get to the chorus. They call this The Listener’s Curse.

FUCK FACE
This kind of rocks. Years ago, Fall Out Boy released a thirteen-minute album called PAX AM Days which they wrote and recorded in one day. It was a very raw, very uncut, very punk little thing that is probably the best ‘project’ they’ve done since they first went on hiatus.

In this little thirty-second snippet, blink-182 have made me curious about what the result of them doing something similar would be. Curious enough to imagine it for the two minutes it took to Google that album and write this segment anyway. I’m done with the idea now sorry.

OTHER SIDE
Well, it’s a short one. That’s good.

CUT ME OFF
It's very strange to hear blink-182, one of the most famous bands of all time, so very clearly influenced by modern musical trends. This track feels like they did an experiment where they listened to every terrible Instagram advert band that’s been knocking around in California for the past ten years and decided to try and emulate that sound with their own spin. It feels so rushed. I’m realising now that a good two-thirds of this album is B-side material, but B-sides don’t exist anymore so instead it’s 11pm and I’m listening to this shit.

SEE YOU
Home stretch. Why does every one of these legacy bands have to close out their album with a weird defiant anthem about some variation of ‘carrying on’? I would love to watch a full-length documentary about a band like blink-182. I think it would be absolutely fascinating to watch their rise to fame and see how their mindset changes from ‘this is fun! I am having so much sex! I’m going to get naked on stage!’ to ‘what we’re doing here is very important…this is my world and they can’t take it from me…my guitar is my gun’. Is self-seriousness an inevitability of success? Or rather an inevitability of intermittent, or stalling, success? I can see how it would be difficult to go from the top of the world to semi-irrelevant in the mainstream within the space of a decade. It must be quite easy in that situation to look back on your career and see it all as Very Important. I suppose when you are so easily defined as The Guy From That Band, you’re backed into a corner of either taking That Band seriously, or not taking yourself seriously. I don’t know. I’m only twenty-eight. I’m a baby. I’m so young I don’t know what happens to old people. Goo goo ga ga. This song sucks ass.

CHILDHOOD
Couldn’t finish this.

Boys. Guys. Fellas.

You don’t seem to know what’s on the line here. I PROMISED THE BEN SHAPIRO NAZIS A GOOD BLINK ALBUM IN EXCHANGE FOR THEM GIVING US SOME LEEWAY ON IMMIGRATION AND ABORTION RIGHTS. TOM, MARK, TRAVIS. I FEEL LIKE YOU DIDN’T TAKE THIS VERY SERIOUSLY AND JUST MADE AN ALBUM FOR YOURSELVES AS A SORT OF FULL STOP ON YOUR CAREERS AND YOUR WORK TOGETHER. I FEEL LIKE YOU WANTED SOME FORM OF CATHARSIS FROM YOUR MUSIC FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME AND YOU DIDN’T REALLY CARE IF IT WASN’T MARKETABLE TO A NEW AUDIENCE OF TEENS CRYING OUT FOR EDGY BUT WHOLESOME ROLE MODELS. I FEEL LIKE YOU DON’T READ MY EMAILS. THE NAZIS ARE COMING. YOU COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING. THE NAZIS ARE COMING. THEY’RE ALL FIVE FOOT FOUR AND WEARING YELLOW CHINOS. HELP ME TENACIOUS D, YOU’RE OUR ONLY HOPE.

3/10