At this point, we all know that Blink-182 have been steering into a very different direction from their classic albums for a while now and there’s seemingly no going back. But the band’s doing their best “how do you do, fellow kids?” with the list of collaborators for their upcoming album.
As NME reported, Travis Barker said in Spotify’s Rock This podcast that the band’s “60% done” with their follow-up to NINE and “there’s a lot of cool stuff” coming. “There’s like a song with Grimes right now that’s really, really cool that I love,” shared Barker. Grimes has collaborated with a miscellany of artists, from Janelle Monáe to Bring Me The Horizon, so while this collab is definitely unexpected, it’s probably not the oddest one so far.
That’s not the only surprising pairing. “There’s a song with Uzi that’s really, really cool that we did with Pharrell,” Barker revealed on the podcast. That actually makes a bit more sense, though, because Uzi’s lyrics fit the early Blink emo days. (Think, “All my friends are dead/Push me to the edge,” or anything off of Luv Is Rage 2.) But Barker says it’s not going to be a rap song, so the band’s not veering into that territory yet: “I mean, it’s not like Blink’s making a rap song or anything. It’s like bringing Uzi over to our world. So it’s more of a punk kind of like reggae-feeling song.” Coincidentally, Grimes and Uzi are working on some collaborative tracks of their own. The rapper made the announcement last month.
It’s certainly an interesting list of collaborators but what a missed opportunity to see what a Blink-182 reggae song with Tom Delonge on vocals would sound like.