After All Time Low wrapped up the touring cycle on their 2023 album, Tell Me I’m Alive, there was a conversation within the band that that might be it. After over 20 years together and nine records, the US pop-punk band weren’t sure if there was much more to do.
Then in August 2024, the band played three hometown shows in Baltimore to celebrate the 20th anniversary and it soon became clear — they were far from done.
Just over a year later, the four-piece are back with their tenth record, Everyone’s Talking!, and in just a matter of weeks, they’ll be back on Australian shores as one of the top billed artists on the Good Things Festival 2025 lineup.
We sat down with frontman Alex Gaskarth to talk about the path to Everyone’s Talking!, the upcoming Australian shows and, most importantly, what All Time Low are in 2025.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ: Everyone’s Talking! is the band’s first studio album since 2023’s Tell Me I’m Alive, but I know these last few years have been a chaotic time. Tell me what’s been happening.
Alex Gaskarth: It’s been wild. I mean, a rollercoaster, you know? Last year, we did this 20-year celebration of All Time Low and saw such an incredible turnout and an amazing wave of support from the fandom. It wasn’t era-specific, it wasn’t a throwback to one particular album, it was just a celebration of the fact that we’ve managed to be a band for 20 years, which I think in this business is pretty crazy in and of itself, you know? It’s a tough industry to stick it out and last.
Off the tail of playing those 20-year celebratory shows, we felt really high on the band. We were really reinvigorated by that and the show of support that we got from everybody, so we decided to make another album. That was at a time when I think we weren’t sure if we wanted to make another album. I think maybe you do this long enough and you’re like, ‘Maybe we’ve told the story. Maybe we’ve said all that needed to be said, and maybe there’s not much left for us to say.’ But we’ve had this newfound sense of belonging to the band and this love for it that was rekindled, and we said, ‘I think there’s another one in the tank.’
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So we sat down and started making music and it felt really good. It felt really realised and really self-assured. We were able to push the boundaries of what we were writing, while staying true to kind of the backbone and core of what makes All Time Low appeal to our fanbase. Over the years, that’s sometimes been a tricky needle to thread when you’re known as a pop-punk band and you came from this one world and this one thing, and then you’re growing. We’re evolving as musicians and artists and we don’t necessarily want to conform to whatever people think being a pop-punk band means.
The beauty of where we are right now as a band is that I think we know how to push our limits without alienating that feeling of what makes All Time Low, All Time Low at is [sic] core.
Hearing you talk about possibly wrapping up All Time Low is very interesting, because I remember we spoke when the last album came out, I did not get any inkling or hint that the band could be reaching its end. Was there talk in the background then about potentially calling it quits?
I don’t know it was ever as overt as saying we’re gonna call it quits, but when you’ve been doing it this long and you’ve made a catalogue as expansive as ours, I think every time we get to a crossroads of what’s next, there’s always gonna be that conversation of like, “Well, what is next?” Is it celebrating [2007 album] So Wrong, It’s Right? Is it playing “Dear Maria, Count Me In” 20 times forever? Is it trying to push through the noise and make new music in a world where music right now feels sometimes very transactional and a new single burns out in five days? It’s always this reevaluation process of like, what do we think people want from All Time Low?
After we wrote Tell Me I’m Alive and toured on that record, it was just, maybe, getting to a point where we were like, “Is there anything more to do or say?” I think it was a good time to check in about that.
The last time we spoke we touched on this resurgence of pop-punk music. This year alone, major bands of that genre, like Good Charlotte, Yellowcard and The Starting Line, have all released new albums. Going back to what you said about All Time Low coming from that world, is it hard to navigate new sounds with the band and stay authentic when this genre has come back in such a massive way?
100%. For us as a band, I think sometimes that’s the struggle that we’ve had with with our identity. Like, who are we now? We started this band, chasing something. We were chasing after blink-182 and Fall Out Boy and NOFX and the punk scene that we grew up idolising. I’ve said this in interviews 1,000 fucking times, so it’s redundant at this point to keep going back and harping on about our origin story, but it does pertain to what I’m saying because that’s not where we are anymore. You know what I mean? We’ve been doing this for a long time now, and for us, it is about trying to make music that we feel lis authentic to who we are as we have evolved and grown as as musicians. That has sometimes been a challenge because when we have shifted the way our records sound, sometimes it hits, and sometimes people go, “This isn’t the band that I grew up listening to and fell in love with.” Where’s my “Jasey Rae”? Where’s my “Coffee Shop Soundtrack”? Where’s my “Dear Maria”? But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t just regurgitate that over and over again.
It’s interesting for us ’cause we never went anywhere, you know? I think some of those bands you mentioned — and this is not to fault them — but those bands took breaks. Those bands took long hiatuses, even if it was an unofficial soft hiatus, they sort of went away and they weren’t making music or actively touring. They’ve had the opportunity to take a bite at this apple as the tree has bloomed again, so to speak. But we, kind of, rode it out.
When the first round of the pop-punk wave crashed, which is the wave we were chasing after, we were like, “Well, we’re just a rock band in the mix now and no one’s talking about pop-punk.” If anything, there was a time there where pop-punk was not cool, and you saw a lot of artists, like the Fall Out Boy’s, the Paramore’s, they all separated themselves from that label and from that genre and went like, “No, no, no, we’re not that, we’re not that at all.” I don’t know that we did that. I think we kind of went, “No, this is the world we came from, this is what inspired us, and we’re gonna continue to do our thing, even if it’s not the cool thing to be doing.”
And so as this resurgence has happened and this nostalgic groundswell has brought the focus back to this genre, I think we’re just happy that we’ve just been here the whole time. The spotlight has kind of just moved back around to the space, and we get to celebrate that in the way that we’ve just been celebrating it the whole time. It’s cool to be a part of because I think we’re making the best music we’ve ever made. We’re happy to still have a place at the table and and happy to still have a fan base that shows us a lot of love and it’s and it’s cool to see all our friends bands get back together and do the damn thing as well! We ran into the Good Charlotte guys the other day and it’s sick to see them firing on all cylinders again.
So when conversations about new music take place within the band, do you lean into the resurgence or do you keep the same attitude when the pop-punk wave crashed back in the 2000s?
Man, that is the golden question right now. Where do we belong in this resurgence? Where do we fit when we’ve been doing it the whole time? I think it is an interesting one because personally, I don’t like the nostalgia too much for us. It feels like it’s the forbidden fruit that’s hanging right there and you’re like, “I wanna bite that fruit so bad!” But it doesn’t feel exciting to me because, like I said, I do feel like we’re making really great music right now. I feel like we’re locked into what All Time Low is. I wanna go push that. I wanna get out there on stages and play what feels fresh right now. It’s a gamble, ’cause the easy answer is go play So Wrong, It’s Right, and [2011 album] Nothing Personal and capitalise on that moment.
But those songs have never left our set. Those songs have always been staples in our show, so it it’s not as though they’ve gone anywhere, but I would have a hard time hitching my wagon entirely to the back catalogue, you know what I mean? We’re having too much fun looking forward, which is a nice place to be. Thankfully, if these first few shows are any indication, people are down for that.
It’s a testament to All Time Low for sticking out over the years because as we gear up for Good Things Festival 2025 in December, you guys are top billing next to the likes of Tool and Weezer.
It is a fucking weird thing to think about. We’ve always had a fair amount of imposter syndrome, and it’s the worst. We’ve always felt like we were the kids that managed to somehow sneak into the party that we weren’t invited to. But that being said, over the years, I do think we’ve started to accept it and be like, you know what? Fuck it. We’ve put in the time, we’ve put in the effort, we’ve put in the energy and we’ve earned our place here with with these other peers, dare I say.
That’s not to say that we have had the same accomplishments or anything, but it’s just a confidence in knowing we’ve had our own accomplishments and we’re very confident in that and proud of those things. There’s a lot less looking outward and going, “Yeah, but Weezer did this and Tool did that.” I still love and respect those bands and I’m a fan of those bands, but I think we finally accepted that it is OK to sit at that table and eat the food, you know? We’re like, “OK, we’ve done it and people like us and that’s all right.” We’ve never considered ourselves the headliner even though we’ve been headlining for many years.
All Time Low were on the very first Good Things lineup in 2018, but you also played the festival in 2019 with blink-182’s Mark Hoppus with side project Simple Creatures. That was obviously put on hold when Mark got sick and then Tom DeLonge eventually rejoined blink in 2022. Is there a future for Simple Creatures?
We always said that that while we both love the project and we love working with each other, we agreed from the jump that Simple Creatures wasn’t going to replace either of our day jobs. It would be something that we would thread in when the time was right. There was a window where we were considering going back and doing more, and then obviously Mark, got sick and went through what he went through and that, kind of, led to the timing of blink coming back together and reuniting. That was meant to be. That was meant to happen, you know? That part of their journey was extremely important, for them.
[But] it’s still something that’s on the table, you know what I mean? Mark and I keep in touch. At this point, it feels like it’s a joke because we’ve both been so busy, so we joke about getting the band back together often. We’re like, “Man, let’s go out on tour tomorrow!” But realistically, I have no fucking idea when we might do it.
What I love is that people even care to ask, you know? It means a lot, and it means a lot to us to hear that when people go, “Hey, is there a future for Simple Creatures?” The fact that that’s even a question is something that Mark and I are just like, “Fuck yeah, that’s cool.”
All Time Low’s Everyone’s Talking! is out now. Click here to check out All Time Low’s Australian dates.
