The last time Alex Gaskarth found himself on a Good Things Festival tour was in 2019.
At that time, Simple Creatures (his project with blink-182’s Mark Hoppus) was making its Australian debut on the festival lineup that featured artists including Simple Plan and Parkway Drive.
Thinking back on that time, Gaskarth admits that the energy then was much different to the one he embraces on this year’s Good Things run, now returning with All Time Low.
As he describes, coming back with All Time Low is “back to the day job.”
“That was a different time because we were figuring out how to be a band,” he says. “It had a much different vibe and dynamic. It’s awesome to be back here with the boys. The last time we were here, we were headlining in 2023. It’s always fun doing a festival like this, festival gigs are just really cool. We know so many people out here, we keep running into old friends.”
It’s not just the school reunion energy that Gaskarth and All Time Low have been driven by while in Australia, of course. The band’s tenth studio album, Everyone’s Talking!, has only been out a few months – an album experience that has opened the band up to new prospects for music going forward.
Released via their own imprint, Basement Noise, Everyone’s Talking! was a chance for All Time Low to follow new creative directions with the freedom that comes with being able to pursue a project in their own way.
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“Whenever we go into a new album cycle, we’re always chasing what the next thing is, what the next version of All Time Low is going to sound like,” Gaskarth explains. “I think we hit a real stride with the last few albums.
“Now, we’ve got our own studio and we were making this album for our own label… the beauty in it was that there was a lot of self-assurance. We were really self-assured with what we wanted to accomplish with this record.”
“We’ve been doing this together for a long time,” he adds. “The same four of us. We know each other intimately in a creative way and it’s given us the freedom to push the boundaries without feeling like you’ve gone off track, because someone will rein it back in. Us being us is the glue for keeping All Time Low on the rails, but it allows us to creatively go on these tangents and explore these sounds. It’s become what we’re known for.”
Still very much enjoying the rollout of the latest album, Gaskarth is optimistic when he looks ahead to where All Time Low is set to move forward in 2026.
He speaks with pride about the band’s new music, and with enthusiasm when he is asked about how his own relationship with songwriting has changed as a result of making Everyone’s Talking!
“The biggest takeaway for me these days is that I’m feeling really self-assured,” he muses. “I know there is a sound and there’s a thing I think people come to expect from All Time Low’s music, but for us to keep it interesting, we’re writing from the perspective of 37-year-old dudes. We’re not 19 years old anymore. We’ve grown with the music and hopefully that comes across. That’s always been the goal.
“I really still cherish an album, a body of work. I like to sit down and listen to an album. I think you get a sense of who an artist is and what they’re trying to say. In a single economy, it’s still great, we can still have fun with the bops. But I still do like to think that our fans do appreciate sitting down and listening to a body of work for the story.”
Gaskarth smiles, thinking about the band’s growth and the fulfilment he still experiences as a music fan.
“Leaving the hotel, we ran into Shirley Manson from Garbage. I’m such a huge fan,” he says. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen enough, it’s nice to run into your idols. It’s bonkers. It’s those moments where you zoom out and you go, ‘What is life?’ When someone tells me that we’ve been a part of their process or their journey in making music, it’s one of those things I have a hard time getting my head around.”
“I think that we still deal with a bit of imposter syndrome,” Gaskarth admits. “Running into someone like Shirley, I’m going, ‘I love your band, you and Butch [Vig] are a huge part of why we make the music we make.’ It’s cyclical, I guess. It’s funny to be in a band where we’ve been able to be that for some people. It’s humbling.”
All Time Low, now in their second decade as a band, still maintain the chemistry that propelled them onto radars around the world in the early 2000s.
To look at their festival setlists speaks to the band’s iron-clad catalogue of hits. Whether pulling from their 2007 major label debut So Wrong, It’s Right, 2009’s Nothing Personal, or cuts from their more recent projects like Wake Up, Sunshine (2020) or Tell Me I’m Alive (2023), All Time Low have been able to revisit a number of different eras that have brought joy and introspection for themselves.
“What this has broken open for me, is potential,” Gaskarth says. “A lot of our peers, a lot of the bands we came up with, have already gone through one cycle of taking hiatuses, break-ups, stepping away and coming back to it with this resurgence of pop-punk and alternative music as it’s swelling again now. We’ve never really stepped away and I don’t think we plan to.
“The sky is the limit and we have so many goals that we’d like to accomplish. There are so many places we’d like to play. Hopefully, when we come back here next time, we’re headlining again and it’s the next tier up of venues. We’ve been lucky that over a 20-year career, we’ve seen that growth. It’s been incremental, it’s not been a quick flash in the pan thing for us. I love that because it tees up what’s next to go and conquer.”
Check out All Time Low’s tour dates here. Find out more about Good Things 2025 here.
