The band that spoke for awkward, young punks everywhere is back again with a new frontman — and a whole new album.
Blink-182, now with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba in place of lead singer Tom DeLonge (who quit for, well, U.F.O-related reasons) is looking to continue the legacy it built in the 1990s — the kind that incites top-of-your-lungs singalongs from everyone whenever your song is played at a bar. “California,” the band’s seventh album and first since 2011, is a 16-track-long walk down nostalgia lane, with tracks that both echo the energetic adolescent joy of the DeLonge era and reflect on the often disappointing realities of growing up.
So far, the full-length has gotten mixed reviews, but overall the reception has been lukewarm. Nonetheless, Spotify data reveals that Blink-182 fans are still rekindling their pop-punk romance 20 years later.
PrettyFamous, an entertainment data site by Graphiq, visualized the most popular Blink-182 tracks based on their Spotify popularity score, calculated by an algorithm that is primarily based on the total number of plays the song has had and how recent those plays are.
The release of “Bored to Death,” the lead single on “California,” has been streaming through speakers the most recently, followed by the band’s iconic hit “All the Small Things,” from Blink-182’s third album, cheekily named “Enema of the State.”
Despite the band’s woeful disinterest in adulthood, the result has been an undeniable hit, as “Bored to Death” became the group’s first No. 1 track on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart since they released their ballad-esque “I Miss You” in 2004.