At this stage in their career, All Time Low could easily take stock and rest, though the longer they’re together, the less complacent they become, frontman Alex Gaskarth says.
“We just get hungrier. I never want to become old hat, I don’t want it to feel easy, I don’t want it to feel dialled in. I want to always feel that there’s a certain danger to what we’re doing.”
With that in mind, new album Last Young Renegade makes a lot of sense. For anyone who’s ever engaged with the effervescent stylings of All Time Low, the sonic mix up on their new album is instantly palpable. With a move towards moodier, electronic sounds, the follow up to 2015’s Future Hearts is the most mature work they’ve created to date, but not a direction they intentionally took from the very start.
“Writing in a way that felt true to us, this is the stuff that came out. That was important too, writing what was natural,” Gaskarth says.
“We’ve always existed within a pretty big box, which we work comfortably in, but in years past there’s been things that have worked, and things that haven’t worked. With this record, now that we have the experience under our belts, we know how to make an album that feels like an All Time Low album to us, but we still want to grow and evolve and push things forward, not just keep making the same album that we’ve made in the past.”
With a consistently growing fanbase, it’s easy to wonder why the band would feel the need to change things up. They’re clearly doing something right, the hunger Gaskarth speaks of isn’t necessary to fill their plates.
“If you keep putting out records that feel safe, it’s a great way to engage your core fans, but eventually it gets stale. Whenever we make a record, and especially recently, that’s always the driving force behind it. How can we challenge people, without scaring them off, but how can we push people to grow with us? That was a big component in the record coming out the way it did,” he says.
“It felt like the time was right, and we felt comfortable knowing what we can do and what we can’t do in making the album. There’s always an anxiety, especially when you’re doing something different, getting too far from the source material that people latched onto originally, but I think our fans were ready for something different, something new.”
The tone for Last Young Renegade was set after writing what Gaskarth labels as the cornerstone songs of the album: Good Times, Last Young Renegade, and Dirty Laundry.
“This record is so self-contained, it feels like it exists within its own little world. Creating the album that way helped us explore the genre more, rather than cater to places we’ve been in the past,” he says.
“It’s a story about self-actualisation, it feels like it’s a story about the fall and then the rise again of this character. It’s them hitting a low point, and then dragging themselves out of it, and being better for it as a result.”
Change is never easy, and the shift of the album shows that. Universal in its themes, yet one of the most personal works from the band, dealing with personal reflection and criticism, it was at times a difficult album to write.
“It’s always difficult to get things out there, but one of the reasons for the character and the narrative was to use it as a device to write a little more externally, and project onto something else. It was the way I got myself through it, as far as taking those walls down, and letting things out that I probably wouldn’t have let out otherwise.
“At the end of the day, it’s about me,” Gaskarth says. “It’s self-reflective, it’s self-critical, airing my demons, but I didn’t want it to come off as an ‘oh, poor me’ record because that’s never been what we’re about.”
The more personal tone of the album is reflective of the headspace of the core members. The thread that ties the whole album together is the anguish and self criticism of the central character. Tackling his demons with a frank sincerity, the musician confides his biggest fears.
“Probably people’s over self-confidence versus their extreme anxieties. I think wrestling with those two things, putting on a front, the face people want to see, and expect, and the thing you want to project, versus the thing that you actually are, and how sometimes those two things can interact,” he says.
Finding release in writing is a relatively new experience for Gaskarth.
“In the past it’s always been more about the stage show for me, in terms of a way to let go and vent, it wasn’t so much in the songwriting, but this record was especially cathartic to make. I was letting off steam with a lot of the music, and a lot of the lyric content.”
This shift lines up neatly with the current state of touring for the band. With seven albums worth of material, there is no doubt going to be ebbs and flows to the set. Everybody has their favourite songs, and when so much is changing, it’s a near impossible task to try and please everyone.
“We’re still struggling with it to be honest. It’s something you have to juggle, six albums worth of material, and some of it’s different. Some of it we wrote when we were really young, some of it people need to hear because they’re former singles. It’s a juggling act, touching on everything people want to hear, yet still not getting bored,” Gaskarth says.
“This record absolutely feels like something new and exciting. I listen to it and feel so proud of it, because it’s taken us to a place that I think will open up a lot of doors for us to go down creatively, and move on and evolve the band into something that it’s never been.”
