It’s 2019. What Does Blink-182 Want to Say?
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It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since Blink-182 released Enema of the State, their third and most famous album. It featured middle-fingers-up bangers such as “All the Small Things,” “What’s My Age Again?,” and “Anthem”—songs that a certain bracket of now-adults memorized as angsty teens back in the ‘90s. Wasn’t it just yesterday that the pop-punk group’s music videos were dominating MTV’s Total Request Live, their posters plastering every inch of suburban bedroom walls alongside Good Charlotte and Evanescence merch?
The record’s 20th anniversary comes at an interesting time for current members Mark Hoppus, Matt Skiba, and Travis Barker; they follow it up today with their ninth album, Nine.
For their new material, the group asked themselves one question: What do we have to say about the world today? “The world is in a really strange place right now,” lead singer Hoppus tells Vogue. “This record is about being a human being in 2019: the joy, fear, and anxiety of it.” He’s not wrong. From a U.S. president who seems more corrupt than ever to technology making us all feel disconnected and sad (“People are growing distant from one another,” Hoppus says), the daily headlines can be, well, a tad overwhelming; on Nine, Blink-182 use music to cope with it all.
The new songs are largely about healing—from depression, anxiety, failed relationships, a broken political system—and feature the signature Blink-182 sound, combining punky guitar and drums with earwormy pop melodies. The album jumps from lighthearted, upbeat tracks to more heavy-hitting ones as a result. Lead single “I Really Wish I Hated You,” a catchy breakup track that veers way more pop than punk, is starkly different to “Heaven,” a meatier track written about the 2018 mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. “It means a lot to me personally,” Hoppus says. “What started off as a song about broken hearts became a song about living in America in 2019.” Then there are tracks like “Happy Days,” which sound poppy but have a darker underbelly. “You’re like, This is a happy song, but the lyrics are about me dragging myself out of occasional depressions,” Hoppus says.
It took a long time for the band to gather all of these emotions into a cohesive album. They first broke ground on Nine in January 2018. “We got in the studio and started kicking ideas around, and came out with four to five really cool songs,” says Hoppus. “Then we fell into a rut. We kept writing the same song over and over again.” After briefly shelving the album and signing with their new label, Columbia, they had a creative epiphany and went back to the studio. “We ended up rewriting the majority of the record. Once we were like, Fuck it—we’re going to write weird stuff, we turned a corner.” On Nine, they indeed get a little weird: The record boasts some of their most experimental flourishes to date, incorporating influences from musical genres from electronica to hip-hop.
Another departure for the band? Kicking off their summer tour, which began in June, with an unexpected tour mate: rapper Lil Wayne. The matchup initially had fans puzzled. “When we first announced it, people in our mentions were like, ‘I don’t want to go see a rapper with a rock band,’” Hoppus says. “But every show, people are singing every single word of Wayne’s set, and then singing every single word of ours…. Genre is pointless and dead at this point. I don’t think there are too many people who are like, ‘I only listen to one style of music.’ Now, kids don’t care. It’s a breath of fresh air. Being stuck in one lane sucks.”
While Hoppus insists that slavish genre loyalty is dead, the popularity of 2000s-era punk bands is definitely on the uptick. Earlier this month, it was announced that Green Day, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy will embark on a Hella Mega Tour in 2020—three groups that, much like Blink, share a severe nostalgia factor. “People who grew up listening to that are adults now,” Hoppus says, “and they are wanting to go back to that feeling when they were young and listening to music.” But while fans are actively seeking to recapture their youth—aren’t we all?—the band is perfectly comfortable living in the now. Hoppus does acknowledge, though, how much the group has changed over the years, especially since shedding two of its founding members: drummer Scott Raynor, who left in 1993, and co-lead singer Tom DeLonge, in 2015.
