Blink-182’s New Millennium Punk

Why mess with a good thing?

That seems to be the prevailing philosophy of Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus and Scott Raynor—better known as the band Blink-182—on their new album Take Off Your Pants & Jacket, which finds the band with its full-blown brand of pop-punk prowess intact.

Where lesser groups which shall remain unnamed (Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls) have been accused of tweaking their sound over the years to appeal to the masses, the Blinksters have managed to stay true to their roots on the new disc, happily cranking out tunes with the same infantile abandon that they displayed on early independent releases such as Buddha (1994), Cheshire Cat (1995) and Dude Ranch (1997).

“We're playing for a lot more people, but we're still writing the same kind of music and still doing the same things we always have,” Hoppus acknowledged during a recent interview with MTV. “We really try to not spend too much time thinking about what we're supposed to be, if we're supposed to be a punk band, or if we're supposed to be whatever. We do the exact same thing today that we've been doing for years and years and years.”

And if new tracks like “First Date,” “Online Songs” and the album’s first single “The Rock Show” are any indication, these mad punk scientists don’t plan on changing their formula any time soon, whether people want to call them post-punk, power-pop or whatever other two-“p” hyphenated adjectives you can come up with.

“I understand why people have a tendency or a need to categorize bands, because you want to be able to understand what they're all about,” DeLonge adds. “You can say we're a punk band, but you can also say we're a pop band. We're just the same.”

Fast Facts:-Blink-182 is from Poway, California, a hotbed of skate punk activity.-The trio added a number to its name after an Irish band named Blink threatened to sue them.-Pants & Jacket is the group’s first studio album since the multi-platinum 1999 release Enema of the State.