Blink-182

• 1. Introduction

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  Blink-182, the American rock band formed in Poway, California, in 1992, owes the number in its name to a deadline it nearly ignored. When the debut album Cheshire Cat caught the attention of an Irish band also called Blink, the trio chose not to fight a legal battle. Their label, Cargo Records, gave them a week to pick a new name. They stalled for more than two weeks beyond that. Finally Cargo called with an ultimatum: "change the name or we'll change it for you." The band settled on a random number, 182. The group went on to sell 50 million albums worldwide, including 15.3 million in the United States. How did three friends from a San Diego suburb, armed with punk covers and irreverent humor, reach an audience that size? Why did a band built on close friendship split apart more than once? And why do critics still argue over whether it was a joke or a lasting influence?

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• 2. Garage to Cargo

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  Getting drunk at a basketball game got Tom DeLonge expelled from Poway High School. His punishment was a single semester at Rancho Bernardo High School, and it quietly started a band. There he played a Battle of the Bands competition and was introduced to drummer Scott Raynor. He also befriended Kerry Key, another student who loved punk rock.

  Key was dating Anne Hoppus, whose brother Mark had recently moved from Ridgecrest, California, to work at a record store and attend college. On the 2nd of August 1992, Anne introduced the two. Both had grown up on punk, with a special fondness for Screeching Weasel and the Descendents. They clicked at once and spent hours in DeLonge's garage swapping lyrics and writing songs. One of those songs, "Carousel", became a fan favorite.

  DeLonge once explained why Southern California punk sounded different from its East Coast cousin. "New York is gloomy, dark and cold. It makes different music. The Californian middle-class suburbs have nothing to be that bummed about." In the early 1990s the region had a large punk population, fed by active surfing, skating and snowboarding scenes. West Coast groups tended to bring more melody to the music.

  Mark Hoppus, hoping to impress his new friend, fell from a lamppost in front of DeLonge's home. He cracked his ankles and spent three weeks on crutches. Meanwhile the trio began practicing in Raynor's bedroom, writing songs, going to movies and punk concerts, and playing practical jokes. They tried several names, including Duck Tape and Figure 8, before DeLonge renamed the group "Blink".

  Cam Jones, a friend and collaborator, lent DeLonge and Raynor a four-track recorder just as Hoppus walked away. Hoppus's girlfriend had demanded that he choose between her and the band. DeLonge and Raynor prepared a demo with Jones on bass. Hoppus then broke up with his girlfriend and rejoined. In May 1993 the trio recorded Flyswatter in Raynor's bedroom, a mix of original songs and punk covers.

  Elks Lodges and YMCA centers were among the unlikely stages the band played, often nearly every weekend. DeLonge kept phoning San Diego clubs for a slot. He also called local high schools, pitching Blink as a "motivational band with a strong antidrug message" in hopes of landing an assembly or lunch period. Journalist Joe Shooman described San Diego then as "hardly a hotbed of musical activity". Even so, the band joined a circuit that included Ten Foot Pole and Unwritten Law. Soon it was opening for touring acts at Soma, a local all-ages venue. Hoppus later said, "The biggest dreams we ever had when we started was to headline a show at Soma."

  Patrick Secor, Hoppus's manager at the record store, fronted money so the band could record a better demo at a local studio called Doubletime. The result, Buddha, arrived in 1994, and the members regarded it as their first legitimate release. That same year Raynor's family moved to Reno, Nevada, and musician Mike Krull briefly took over on drums. The band saved money to fly Raynor in for shows. By mid-1995 Raynor had moved back and in with Hoppus.

  Cargo Records sat at the heart of the local independent scene. With help from O, guitarist for the punk band Fluf, and from Brahm Goodis, a friend whose father was the label's president, Cargo offered the band a deal on a "trial basis". Only Hoppus signed. DeLonge was at work, and Raynor was still a minor. Cheshire Cat, recorded in three days at Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles, came out in February 1995. It mixed new songs with re-recordings from earlier demos. Its first single, "M+M's", earned local airplay on the radio station 91X, and Cargo handed the band a small budget to film a music video.

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• 3. Road to a Major

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  Rick DeVoe, who had worked with NOFX, Pennywise and the Offspring, became the band's manager. Rick and Jean Bonde of the Tahoe booking agency also took on the trio and were credited with spreading its name far and wide. In late 1995 the group set out on its first national tour, promoting the surf video Good Times alongside Unwritten Law, Sprung Monkey and 7 Seconds. Filmmaker Taylor Steele, a friend of DeVoe, directed the video. To prepare, the members bought their own tour van and nicknamed it the Millennium Falcon.

  Australia was on the Good Times itinerary, but the trio could not afford the trip. Members of Pennywise paid for their plane tickets. Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge believed in the band so strongly that he demanded Kevin Lyman, founder of the traveling Warped Tour, sign them for 1996. He predicted they would become "gigantic". That year the band toured heavily, with domestic shows on and off the Warped Tour, trips to Canada and Japan, and more Australian dates. Australia embraced the humorous stage antics, which won the band a reputation. They also left the trio ostracized and treated as a joke.

  By March 1996 major labels were noticing. A bidding war broke out among Interscope, MCA and Epitaph. MCA promised complete artistic freedom and ultimately signed the group. Raynor had a great affinity for Epitaph and began to feel half-invested once the band chose MCA. The others had grown discouraged by Cargo's weak distribution and lack of faith, so a major label did not trouble them. The punk community, however, criticized them fiercely.

  Mark Trombino produced the follow-up, Dude Ranch, which the band recorded over about a month in late 1996. It was released in June 1997, and the group headed out on that year's Warped Tour. "Dammit", the album's second single, received heavy airplay on modern rock stations. Dude Ranch shipped gold by 1998. That milestone arrived just as an exhausting touring schedule began to strain the three friends.

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• 4. Stardom Arrives

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  Travis Barker, drummer for tour-mate the Aquabats, learned a 20-song setlist in 45 minutes before his first show with Blink-182. He was filling in for Raynor, who had been drinking heavily to offset personal issues. DeLonge and Hoppus fired Raynor in mid-1998, even though he had agreed to attend rehab and quit drinking. Hoppus claimed in his memoir that Raynor had actually chosen to quit voluntarily. By July Barker had joined full-time. Later that year the band entered the studio with producer Jerry Finn to begin its third album.

  Enema of the State, released in 1999, turned the trio into one of the biggest international rock acts as the new millennium began. It moved over fifteen million copies worldwide. The singles "What's My Age Again?", "All the Small Things" and "Adam's Song" became radio staples, and their videos on MTV made the band household names. The album also began a friendship with Finn. MTV News writer James Montgomery called the veteran engineer "an invaluable member of the Blink team" who helped "smooth out tensions and hone their multiplatinum sound."

  The jump in scale was dramatic. At the start of the album's promotional cycle, the trio drove from show to show in a van towing a trailer of merchandise and equipment. By the end they were flying on private jets. Hoppus said they had gone from "playing small clubs and sleeping on people's floors" to "headlining amphitheaters and staying in five-star hotels."

  In public, Blink became known for juvenile antics, including running around nude. The band even made a cameo in the bawdy comedy American Pie, also released in 1999. Music critic Kelefa Sanneh said the goofy branding, spread through video documentaries and merchandise, "made fans feel like members of their extended social circle." The members turned their success into businesses such as Famous Stars and Straps, Atticus Clothing and Macbeth Footwear.

  Gratitude gave way to unease about their image. The European arm of UMG took photos that lampooned boy bands and distributed them at face value, which made the band's parody look thin. The group responded with a conscious push to seem more authentic. The comically titled Take Off Your Pants and Jacket arrived in 2001 and became the first punk rock album to reach number one in the United States. It produced the singles "The Rock Show", "First Date" and "Stay Together for the Kids". The band carried it on the road with the Pop Disaster Tour, a series of co-headlining dates with Green Day.

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• 5. Breakup and Survival

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  After Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, the pace turned punishing. The band felt rushed into a follow-up, and record executives reportedly penalized the group if it did not "make their quarterly revenue statements." During time off from touring, DeLonge felt a pull to broaden his sound. He channeled chronic back pain and the frustration it caused into Box Car Racer, a 2002 project inspired by post-hardcore.

  Jerry Finn returned to produce, and DeLonge invited Barker to play drums. That left Hoppus the odd man out. DeLonge claimed the omission was not intentional, but Hoppus felt betrayed, and it opened a serious rift between the friends. MCA's A&R representatives were eager to market a new band from the guitarist, so Box Car Racer grew into a full side project and launched two national tours in 2002. Barker, meanwhile, extended his love of hip-hop into Transplants, a rap rock group formed with Tim Armstrong of Rancid.

  The trio regrouped in 2003 to make a fifth album. All three members became fathers before it was released, and that shift in life pushed them to add experimental elements to their pop-punk sound. The untitled record, with a new "smiley face" logo on its cover, came out in November 2003 on Geffen Records, which had absorbed sister label MCA earlier that year. Critics generally praised the more emo direction, and the lead singles "Feeling This" and "I Miss You" were well received. Touring took the band to Japan and Australia. It also took them to the Persian Gulf, where they played for troops stationed there during the first year of the Iraq War. The members later called this period a "huge turning point" in how they wrote, recorded and viewed themselves.

  In February 2005 a press statement announced the band's "indefinite hiatus". Arguments over the future and the recording process had broken the trio apart. DeLonge was conflicted about his creative freedom and about what touring cost his family. He asked for a half-year break from the road, which Hoppus and Barker thought was far too long. Rehearsals for a benefit concert turned contentious. DeLonge quit and founded Angels & Airwaves, both a band and a "multimedia project" of albums, films and interactive services. Hoppus and Barker made one album as +44. Barker stayed famous partly through his rocky relationship with former Miss USA Shanna Moakler, chronicled in his MTV series Meet the Barkers.

  DeLonge and Hoppus did not speak between the breakup and 2008. That August, Jerry Finn suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. The following month Barker and collaborator Adam Goldstein were in a plane crash that killed four people, and the two were the only survivors. Barker suffered second and third degree burns and developed post-traumatic stress disorder. The crash led to sixteen surgeries and multiple blood transfusions. Goldstein's injuries were less severe, yet he died of a drug overdose less than a year later.

  Barker's brush with death brought the three men together that October. They talked through the hiatus and the breakup, and DeLonge was the first to raise the idea of reuniting. Hoppus remembered DeLonge asking, "Where are your heads at?" Hoppus replied that the band should "get back on the road and back in the studio and do what we love doing."

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• 6. Exits and Returns

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  At the February 2009 Grammy Awards, the trio appeared together as presenters to announce its reunion. A North American reunion tour ran from July to October 2009, followed by a European run from August to September 2010. Barker was now afraid of flying after the crash. He traveled by bus within North America and by ocean liner for overseas dates.

  Neighborhoods, the sixth album, was slowed by separate studios, tours, managers and personal projects. DeLonge recorded at his studio in San Diego while Hoppus and Barker worked in Los Angeles, which mirrored their strained communication. It was self-produced, making it their first album without Finn since Dude Ranch. Released in September 2011, it peaked at number two on the Billboard 200. Its singles, "Up All Night" and "After Midnight", found only modest chart success. Pop-punk was going through a stretch of diminished commercial relevance, and the label Interscope was reportedly disappointed with sales.

  The band kept touring through the early 2010s. In 2011 it headlined the 10th Annual Honda Civic Tour in North America with My Chemical Romance, and in 2012 it launched a 20th Anniversary Tour. Drummer Brooks Wackerman filled in for Barker on that tour because Barker was not yet ready to fly. The group played the Reading and Leeds Festivals for the fourth time, its second as headliner. It also left long-time label UMG and self-released an EP, Dogs Eating Dogs. DeLonge's final show of this era came at the Wine Amplified Festival in Las Vegas on the 11th of October 2014. Both Barker and DeLonge later described the reunion years as dysfunctional. Hoppus said, "Everything was always very contentious," and added, "I knew there was something wrong." In his memoir Can I Say, Barker claims DeLonge abruptly quit in mid-2014 and rejoined the following day.

  A seventh album had been delayed for years, and the band planned to begin writing it in January 2015. Barker said he felt awful for fans who had been promised records and never received them. A deal with the independent service BMG was finalized and sessions were booked. Then DeLonge's manager announced that he wanted to spend more time on "non-musical activities" and leave the group indefinitely. DeLonge said he "Never planned on quitting, I just find it hard as hell to commit." He devoted himself to his company To the Stars... Academy of Arts & Sciences, which investigates UFOs.

  Hoppus and Barker carried on. They asked Matt Skiba, singer and guitarist of Alkaline Trio, to fill in for three shows in March 2015. Hoppus and Skiba had wanted to work together for years, so Skiba was the first and only person considered. After legal battles with DeLonge were resolved, Skiba became an official member. The album California, produced by John Feldmann, came out through BMG in July 2016. It was the band's second number-one album on the Billboard 200 and its first in 15 years. It also topped the charts in the United Kingdom for the first time. The lead single, "Bored to Death", became their biggest hit in years, and the album earned the band its first Grammy Award nomination.

  During these years the band teamed up with outside artists, sometimes without Skiba, on singles with XXXTentacion, Lil Wayne, Goody Grace, Steve Aoki, Powfu, Oliver Tree and the Chainsmokers. In 2018 Hoppus formed the spin-off project Simple Creatures with Alex Gaskarth of All Time Low. Blink-182 moved back to a major label, Columbia, for its eighth album, Nine, in 2019. Nine added hip hop-inspired programming and electronics to the pop-punk sound. The COVID-19 pandemic stunted its promotion in 2020 and shelved a planned tour with the Used. The band released "Quarantine" credited only to Barker, Hoppus and other songwriters, which raised questions about Skiba's place. His last show with the band was at iHeartRadio's ALTer EGO in Los Angeles on the 18th of January 2020.

  On the 23rd of June 2021, Hoppus confirmed that he had a rare form of cancer. He had been receiving treatment in secret for three months. Reports said he met DeLonge and Barker at his home to talk through old problems and his diagnosis. Hoppus was declared cancer-free later that year, with screenings every six months. Soon after, the three agreed the time was right for DeLonge to return.

  Speculation peaked in October 2022, when the band deleted all of its earlier social media posts and began posting cryptic messages. On the 11th of October 2022, it announced DeLonge's return, a new album and a two-year world tour. Skiba, absent from the promotional material, learned the news shortly before it broke, though he had not known it concerned DeLonge. DeLonge later messaged him on Instagram to thank him. Skiba congratulated the others and thanked fans. A new single, "Edging", followed that week and became the band's fourth and longest-running number one on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart. It was also their highest-charting single on the Hot 100 in eighteen years.

  The ninth album, One More Time..., was released on the 20th of October 2023. It became the band's third number-one album on the Billboard 200, and critics celebrated its back-to-basics approach. Its title track became the band's longest-running number one on the Alternative Airplay chart. A deluxe edition, One More Time... Part-2, followed on the 6th of September 2024. That August DeLonge said the band would "be the priority forever." He called the moment "a whole new beginning." On the 13th of February 2025, at a Los Angeles wildfire benefit show at the Hollywood Palladium, Skiba joined the band on stage to perform "Bored to Death". He later appeared on stage occasionally during the Missionary Impossible tour. In March and April 2025, DeLonge and Hoppus said new material was in the works. That September the band co-headlined Riot Fest in Chicago alongside "Weird Al" Yankovic, Green Day, Jack White, Weezer and Idles.

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• 7. Sound and Words

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  The Descendents are the group Blink-182 has named most often as its greatest influence. The band has also credited the Beatles, the Ramones, the Beach Boys, the Cure, Depeche Mode, U2, NOFX, Bad Religion, Fugazi and Green Day, among others. The music is mainly called pop-punk, a blend of pop influences with traditional punk rock. Fast tempos, catchy melodies, distorted electric guitar and power chord changes run through the catalog. Earlier albums have also been labeled skate punk and punk rock, and the band sits under the wider umbrella of alternative rock.

  Jon Caramanica of The New York Times wrote that the band took punk's playful core and gave it "a shiny, accessible polish." Luke Lewis of Total Guitar put it simply in 2003: "They wrote catchy songs, radio stations played them." DeLonge wrote "All the Small Things", the band's biggest hit, partly because he figured the label might want a radio song. "It was obvious from the beginning it would fit that format," he told Lewis. He added, "We don't want obstacles between us and our audience." In a 2014 interview he recalled admiring NOFX's record Punk in Drublic, which sounded good and felt like a game-changer. He wanted to go further. "There had never been a pop punk band that sounded like nursery rhymes on steroids, on the mainstream level at least."

  DeLonge's guitar style trades solos for riffs. It is often down-stroked and heavy on power chords and palm muting. His later work explores effects, with ambience and delay in the foreground. Many Blink songs revolve around the I-V-vi-IV chord progression. Hoppus is known for a well-defined midrange bass tone. Because the band is a trio, he works as a hybrid of rhythm guitarist and bassist. The early albums with Scott Raynor, Cheshire Cat and Dude Ranch, are fast and double-time. Travis Barker widened the rhythmic palette after 1998 with nods to Afro-Cuban music, bossa nova, reggae and hip hop. His marching band background still shapes his drum fills and the setup of his kit.

  Nitsuh Abebe of New York wrote that the band's biggest recurring topic is maturity, "more specifically, their lack of it, their attitude toward their lack of it, or their eventual wide-eyed exploration of it." Relationships, suburbia, toilet humor and teen angst fill the songs, and Hoppus and DeLonge, later joined by Skiba, split the writing, often drawing on their own lives. "What's My Age Again?" takes on Peter Pan syndrome. "Dammit", the band's first mainstream hit, carries the hook "Well, I guess this is growing up." Rolling Stone dubbed Take Off Your Pants and Jacket a concept album chronicling adolescence.

  Hoppus insisted these themes were not only for teenagers. "The things that happen to you in high school are the same things that happen your entire life," he said. "You can fall in love at sixty; you can get rejected at eighty." Neighborhoods moved into darker territory, with depression and loss. California aimed for universality while dwelling on miscommunication and loss of identity.

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• 8. Reputation and Legacy

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  "Beige little boxes in a row" is how Hoppus described the suburbs in one song, and he meant it fondly. Other punk acts rose from sometimes dangerous cities, while Blink-182 professed love for the neighborhoods it came from. Pitchfork critic Jeremy Gordon said, "They weren't selling out; they were buying in." He tied that to a Southern California upbringing that encouraged "a sunny prankishness at odds with urban despair."

  Critics took shots at the simple arrangements and clean sound. NME reviewer Steven Wells compared the band to sanitized new wave acts that major US labels pushed around 1981 in a late bid to cash in on punk. A 2001 Federal Trade Commission report condemned the entertainment industry for marketing lewd lyrics to American youth and named Blink-182 among the most explicit acts. Punk veteran John Lydon dismissed the band as a "comedy act". Green Day openly criticized its stage presence. NOFX felt Blink had copied its clowning, and frontman Fat Mike jokingly sang a profane line against Blink-182 fans at shows. In its autobiography NOFX said it did not dislike the members personally. It also said it turned down a seven-figure offer to open for them in the early 2000s.

  Accusations of selling out began as early as 1996, when the band first partnered with the music conglomerate UMG. Ties to MTV, boardsport companies and clothing brands fed the charge that the group was betraying punk's independent spirit. Part of the scene also objected to the band's fixation on female fans flashing them at concerts and to lyrics seen as sexist or misogynistic. Some writers call the stage banter, juvenile and at times homophobic or sexist, an accurate picture of millennial male conversation in its era. Others rank the band among the least offensive of the aughts pop-punk wave. Sanneh observed, "Many of Blink's best songs endure because they turn inward: the lovelorn boy has sense enough to wonder what's wrong with him." Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic added that "playing with and panicking at the idea of being gay was actually vital to the band's identity."

  Richard Blenkinsop of Reverb.com wrote that "no discussion of pop punk can take place without mention of blink-182." Sanneh, writing in The New Yorker, said the band "spawned more imitators than any American rock band since Nirvana." Its songs are straightforward and easy to play on guitar, which made them a common choice for beginners. Lewis of Total Guitar said that was key in persuading a generation of kids to pick up the guitar and form bands. Cameron Hurley of We Are the In Crowd said "Dammit" was, for many, the introduction to pop punk guitar playing.

  Reviews at the time were rarely glowing, and many reviewers wrote the band off as a joke. Later assessments were kinder. Andy Greenwald of Blender wrote that "the quick transformation from nudists to near geniuses is down-right astonishing." Nicole Frehsée of Rolling Stone said a new generation of rock fans found the sound "hugely influential." In his 2021 book Major Labels, Sanneh called the band a "generational touchstone" whose sound and humor aged gracefully.

  In 2011, Caramanica asserted that "no punk band of the 1990s has been more influential than Blink-182." He heard its sound in Fall Out Boy and in Warped Tour bands such as All Time Low and the Maine. Montgomery agreed: "without them, there'd be no Fall Out Boy, no Paramore, or no Fueled by Ramen Records." Scott Heisel wrote in a 2009 Alternative Press cover story that the band "might well be contemporary punk's version of the Beatles." The same magazine later ranked Blink fourth on its list of the "30 Most Influential Bands of the Past 30 Years", behind Radiohead, Fugazi and Nirvana.

  Panic! at the Disco and All Time Low began by covering Blink-182 songs, and You Me at Six and 5 Seconds of Summer name the band as an influence. Joel Madden of Good Charlotte said, "Anyone in our genre would be lying if they said they weren't influenced by Blink-182." Pierre Bouvier of Simple Plan said everyone in the scene wanted to sound like Enema of the State, an album that "flipped the scene on its head." Avril Lavigne, Juice Wrld, Lil Peep, Machine Gun Kelly, Taylor Swift and the Chainsmokers are among the many artists who have cited the band. The Chainsmokers even mentioned it in the lyrics of their number-one hit "Closer".

  Not everyone agreed. In 2013 Angelica Leicht of Houston Press ranked Blink ninth on her list of "The 10 Suckiest Bands of the '00s", blaming it for the birth of acts like Simple Plan and Panic! at the Disco, though she praised the drumming. A different kind of recognition came in 2019, when "All the Small Things" became the theme song of the National Hockey League's Colorado Avalanche.

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