After years of turmoil, including drummer Travis Barker’s 2008 plane crash, singer-bassist Mark Hoppus’s successful battle with cancer, and the departure (and recent return) of singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge, Blink-182 takes what feels like a victory lap on One More Time… The first single, “Edging,” is a pop-punk stomper that, at least superficially, bears all of the Blink hallmarks. But the rest of the singles have been a mixed bag: The über-schmaltzy title track reflects on the group members’ friendship with rather prosaic lyrics—“Do I have to die to hear you miss me?”—while the fiery “More Than You Know” channels post-hardcore while also making reference to the tragedy that frequently surrounds the band.
This dynamic is indicative of the album as a whole: For every triumphant return to form, there’s an uninspired dud. On the opening “Anthem Part 3,” Blink-182’s renewed energy is immediately palpable. Two songs later, though, “Fell In Love” feels too much like it’s pandering to a pop audience with its cutesy synthesizer riff and Hoppus’s limp “na na na” refrain.
Blink-182 had trouble navigating a changing industry the last time they staged a comeback with 2011’s stubbornly idiosyncratic Neighborhoods. This time, as on their last two albums, they’ve brought in outside collaborators, like OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, Aldae, and Michael Pollack, whose bona fides make them both a dubious fit and a likely requirement to release music on a major label in 2023. But why Blink-182 needed help writing the 24-second “Turn This Off!” is anybody’s guess.
Tracks like “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got” boast flavorless approximations of the sticky hook that the band has been churning out since the late ’90s. Lyrically, the song is trite and repetitive, with lines like “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s over.” Elsewhere, “When We Were Young” merely repeats sentiments from 2013’s similarly titled “When I Was Young.”
The album’s most inspired moments, then, come when Blink-182 keeps it in the family, so to speak. Co-written by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, the raging “Fuck Face” brings some unexpected hardcore grit to the Blink oeuvre, while singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge’s longtime Angels & Airwaves sound engineer Aaron Rubin seems to have a firm grasp on how to spin the formula in interesting directions. “Blink Wave” incorporates synthwave influences, and “Turpentine” is wonderfully chaotic with its constant back and forth between anthemic choruses and potty-mouthed non sequiturs: “Stick your dick in Ovaltine/Snort a bag of Dramamine.”
One More Time… lacks the effortless goofball hooks of 1999’s Enema of the State and the varied textures of 2005’s Blink-182. It doesn’t exactly reinvent the pop-punk wheel—it also could’ve stood to lose about half a dozen songs—but its brightest, most exhilarating spots are a welcome reminder of what made the trio so iconic in the first place.
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