Three years after 2020’s “Wake up, sunshine”, the band returns with “Tell me I’m alive”
Reviewed Mar 22, 2023 by
Elena Palmieri
After pulling the strings of almost two decades of career with “Wake up, sunshine” in 2020, All Time Low are now back with the new album “Tell me I’m alive”, with which they reveal an even more pop attitude.
Pop punk, more and more pop
About three years ago, perhaps due to some aftermath of the late adolescent crisis left by the lockdown, there was an increasingly incisive return of those frenetic and pimping sounds that made pop punk popular between the 1990s and the early 2000s, bringing bands like Offspring, Blink-182 and Green Day to establish themselves on the mainstream with radio hits. Although it seemed to have disappeared from the radar of the general public for some time, in the 2020s the genre began to reassert itself again, even influencing young artists from other areas and letting itself be contaminated by other styles. Rappers have started embracing guitars, with Machine Gun Kelly being crowned the ‘Prince of Pop Punk’ last year thanks to his latest album ‘Mainstream sellout’. New names, such as Mod Sun, Kennyhoopla and Willow (Will Smith’s daughter), have made their way becoming references for Generation Z, who on TikTok found themselves resurrecting old songs from All Time Low and the like.
As a result, nostalgic operations have found fertile ground, starting with festivals such as “When we were young”. And many artists, from Avril Lavigne with “Love sux” to Blink-182 reunited with Tom DeLonge, passing through Simple Plan and Paramore, however, have returned to reclaim their role as kings and queens of pop punk and its surroundings, twenty years after voicing their peers’ teenage turmoil.
In this revival that finds its guru in Travis Barker, when even debates have already taken hold on what remains original and authentic of the genre today (while in Italy Salmo has dusted off its hardcore soul with Le Carie and bands like La Sad recover the emo imagery of the 2000s together with attitudes and sounds stolen from the trap), therefore All Time Low could not fail to reappear on the market.
The return of All Time Low
In 2020, the Baltimore lineup surpassed the pop breakthrough of the previous “Last young renegade” (2017) by enclosing in a single disc, “Wake up, sunshine”, its first seventeen years of career – which this year have become twenty rounds.
In the fifteen songs of their eighth studio album, Alex Gaskarth and his team had retraced the sonorities and attitudes, from the more light-hearted to the less impetuous ones, experienced in their previous works. Thus the challenge of understanding which direction to take and with which spirit to face it had opened up for the band. Three years later, after having updated their sound several times and collaborated with different artists (including Demi Lovato), the US group does not want to miss the opportunity offered by the pop punk revival. With the new album “Tell me I’m alive”, All Time Low reveal their intention to try to carve out a space in the mainstream again, flirting with the new trends of the genre. .
While some of their “peer” colleagues, starting from the sk8er girl of the 2000s and the trio of “Enema of the state”, have decided to come back recovering the attitude and the sounds of the origins, not always getting the moves right, All Time But Low have taken a slightly different direction. Although with the same intention of trying to regain possession of the frenzy made of fast drums and distorted guitars on which they have shaped their sound since the beginning, in the thirteen tracks – for just over 40 minutes – of “Tell me I’m alive” the band sweetens the pill even more to satisfy his new radio aspirations.
The direction of “Tell me I’m alive”
The task of opening the disc is entrusted to the title track which, by bringing together soft and enthralling sounds with a finale of immediate guitars and frenetic drums, perfectly introduces and anticipates the key to understanding the album. In “Tell me I’m alive” All Time Low go through different sounds and moods, in which the electronic cues of songs like “Modern love” find space, the euphoria of “Are you there?” which brings back the distorted guitars and the catchiest riffs, up to the darker tones of “Calm down”.
Alex Gaskarth and company don’t seem to push too much on originality, in favor of pieces guided by their experience. However, the band finds balance and motivation in the influences of new musical trends, so simple and captivating riffs give way to more refined and studied productions. In this way the electronics, the effects and the drum machines of “Sleepwalking” or the more commercial atmospheres of “New religion”, which are found up to the concluding “The other side” and “Lost along the way”, manage to accompany the thoughts and stories contained in “Tell me I’m alive”. Thus the group presents an album based on an honest, profound and personal story, where there is room to reflect on the contemporary (“Kill ur vibe”), on relationships (“You’re obsessed with drugs and dating/Modern love’s too complicated ”, recites the chorus of the second track) and on one’s condition (“The sound of letting go”).
Even if after “Wake up, sunshine” they could and should have dared a little more, All Time Low therefore never stop having fun and “Tell me I’m alive” manages, if nothing else, to be listened to lightly. And maybe songs like “Tell me I’m alive” and “Are you there?” they will find space in some spring playlist among the followers of the scene.