Veteran pop punkers All Time Low returned to their roots on 2020’s Wake Up, Sunshine and in the process scored the biggest chart-topping song of their career with “Monsters”. Despite the fact the band has been around since the early aughts and been a mainstay in the pop punk scene for over 20 years (which naturally included multiple stints on the Vans Warped Tour) the band is still relatively young compared to their contemporaries. Lead singer Alex Gaskarth is “only” 36 years old (as old as me!) which is due to the fact that the band started as a project when Gaskarth was still in high school.
All Time Low may not have a magnum opus album in the way that some of their well known pop punk contemporaries have– I’m looking at you Blink 182 Enema of the State (1999), Sum 41 All Killer No Filler (2001), Neck Deep Life’s Not Out To Get You (2015), and The Story So Far Proper Dose (2018)— but Wake Up, Sunshine is a reminder that those achievements aren’t needed if you can deliver consistently good songs for an obscenely long time. There’s something to be said for staying power and therefore there’s something to be said for All Time Low. They deserve a ton of respect for simply being a constant voice in the scene for two decades plus and still going strong.
Standout Songs: “Some Kind of Disaster”, “Sleeping Sin”, “Monsters”, “Favorite Place”
