Blink-182: One More Time...
Blink-182
One More Time…
Release Date: October 20th, 2023
Label: Columbia
Review by Jared Stossel
Yes, I know that this review should have been published last year. Blink-182 returned with a magnum opus titled One More Time… maybe the most gutwrenching and personal work they’ve released to date. That’s saying a lot for a band that has not only released many epically personal works over the last three decades but has been able to interweave dick and fart jokes throughout them with aplomb. Look no further than Take Off Your Pants and Jacket including the divorce anthem “Stay Together For The Kids” and the breakneck speed South Park joke that is “Happy Holidays You Bastard” taking up space on the same disc.
I won’t get too much into it, mainly because I’ve already written about it, but last August, my wife was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (and I’m happy to report that she’s been in remission since January). From August to January of 2023, I found it increasingly difficult to listen to new music. My focus wasn’t there, even with one of my favorite bands releasing an incredible album. Every time I would hit “play” on the album, something in the real world would go wrong. Add into this scenario that I couldn’t get through tracks like “One More Time” or “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got” without breaking down in tears. It hit too hard.
After finally catching up on album after album from 2023, with this hell behind us, I can confidently say that One More Time… may be one of my favorite albums not just of 2023, but one of my favorite albums from Blink’s entire discography. The band - comprised of vocalist/bassist Mark Hoppus, vocalist/guitarist Tom DeLonge, and drummer Travis Barker - surprised fans earlier in 2023 when they announced that DeLonge - who has been in an on-again-off-again relationship of sorts with the band over the last decade - announced that he was returning for good, along with a brand new album and a new tour. Fans were excited, but some were skeptical, given that DeLonge had both joined and left the band numerous times over the years. The fallout was always monumental, and even with an excellent addition like Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba - a worthy successor who did a great job filling in for DeLonge over two full-length albums and numerous world tours - it never quite felt right.
This time feels different. Hoppus, DeLonge, and Barker are older, wiser, and have gone through hell and back to get to the point of writing and recording One More Time. The eponymous lead single may be the most honest they’ve ever written, finally digging into the demons that have torn them apart and put them together again like Barker’s plane crash in 2008 or Hoppus’ battle with lymphoma back in 2021. Lines like “I wish they told us, it shouldn’t take a sickness/Or airplanes falling out the sky” hit like a ton of bricks, and there are several moments that evoke a sense of extreme poignancy throughout the album.
While I am a loyal fan of the band’s first “reunion” album with 2011’s Neighborhoods, I think that One More Time is the album that Blink-182 has been trying to make all along, and they’ve done a beautiful job. Emotional moments like the aforementioned are layered in between stadium-ready pop-punk riffs and anthemic choruses on songs like “Anthem Part 3”, “Dance With Me”, “More Than You Know”, “Turpentine”, and “Edging”. Others are snapshots of a time long gone when the band was embracing their punk roots in small dive bars and clubs in the San Diego area. These moments are “Turn This Off!” and “Fuck Face”, each barely clocking in at 30 seconds, with the former being, well, a cumshot joke, while the latter finds Barker in rare form as lead vocalist, blasting through a SoCal punk riff with ferocity and fuzzy guitars.
“Other Side” acts as a fitting eulogy to a friend who has since passed on, questioning the unfairness of life and how quickly people can just be taken (“How can I go back to Holmdel?/ How could you leave without saying goodbye?”). As much as they jump between lightheartedness and heavier moments, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Blink this in touch with mortality in their lyrics before. Then again, I don’t think it’s possible to walk away from life without looking at things differently.
Two songs on the album, “When We Were Young” and “Childhood”, look back at the earliest years of life with the rose-colored glasses smashed to pieces in the corner. The former track sounds like the classic Blink we’ve come to know and love, while the concluding latter song feels more akin to a song on a Twenty One Pilots album (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing). A dream-like haze is laced over the track, as Hoppus sings of a way of life that now seems long gone (“Remember when we were young/And we’d laugh at everything?/Got caught up in a world/That forgot how to dream”). Hindsight truly is 20/20, and this kind of reflection is a reminder that, sometimes, we have no idea how life can get until it truly gets bad. It makes all of those little moments that make life worth living even sweeter, and it puts some perspective on the past. This reflection shows us where we may have taken things for granted, and where something that once felt like the end of the world maybe wasn’t really all that bad.
It feels good to exorcise your demons. Blink-182 has made an art out of it.
