It’s hard to think of Avril Lavigne as an elder stateswoman of pop-punk when she looks almost exactly the same on the cover of her seventh album, at 37, as she did on her 20 year-old debut album, Let Go. This time, she sounds the same too. Aside from the lone ballad, Dare to Love Me, she’s ditched the serious tone that characterised her tedious previous offering, Head Above Water. On Love Sux it’s 2002 all over again, right down to the textspeak spelling of the title and Bois Lie. The guitars are raw and racing, the choruses packed with shoutalong catchiness, and the whole thing hurtles past in barely more than half an hour.
It’s a smart move. Back then, alongside her fellow skinny tie wearers, Busted, she was derided as the unnecessary training wheels on “real” rock’s bicycle. Why listen to this cynically marketed baby food when there was Green Day and Blink-182, who had built fanbases more slowly and credibly before finally attaining platinum sales figures a few years earlier? The divide between pop and rock was more pronounced two decades ago, and though Pink managed it around the same time, trying to straddle both worlds could be uncomfortable. Charlie Simpson of Busted could barely conceal his disgust at his own music.
