“Older, but nothing’s any different,” croons Mark Hoppus on the title track of Blink-182’s ninth album One More Time.... Bells toll and dragged guitar phrases drone out the soppy sadness of the Californian pop-punk outfit’s reunion with guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge (who has been absent for seven years).
On the same song, DeLonge charts their bro-mantic journey from “strangers to brothers... brothers to strangers”, before Hoppus responds with the acknowledgment that “it shouldn’t take a sickness or airplanes falling out of the sky” for them to get back into the studio together. The line addresses both Hoppus’s 2021 cancer diagnosis (he’s had the all-clear since) and drummer Travis Barker’s survival of a 2008 Learjet crash, in which four people died. Barker was left with severe burns, a back broken in three places and a temporarily numb right hand.
