Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By All Time Low, Fueled By Ramen, 2020.
All Time Low is an American pop/punk band who have been around for some time.
Since 2003 they have notched up five straight entries on the Billboard Top 200 including their Gold certified album Nothing Personal (2009), Dirty Work (2011), Future Hearts (2015) and Last Young Renegade (2017).
The band has also made its mark in Australia with Future Hearts debuting at #4 on the ARIA chart in 2015 and experiencing an extended stay.
Wake Up, Sunshine is their latest release and it’s certain to emulate the achievements of their earlier award winning efforts, and probably surpass them.
They have already achieved chart success with a series of singles from the album.
Late last year they released four singles, Getaway Green, Melancholy Kaleidoscope, Trouble Is and Wake Up, Sunshine.
In January they followed up with Some Kind Of Disaster which was praised by Billboard who wrote “Some Kind Of Disaster begins the next era For All Time Low.”
They continued the publicity blitz early in February with Sleeping In, and then the pandemic hit.
All the planned tours and publicity were shelved but, after some deliberation the band decided to still release the album because, as front man Alex Gaskarth says , “I feel like people need some new tunes, and I hope that this record can be cathartic for people and help them through this weird, wild time.”
The circumstances surrounding the album’s release are unfortunate for the band because they had invested a good deal of energy in its creation.
Throughout 2019 the four musicians congregated together in drummer Rian Dawson’s Nashville studio and at a Palm Springs rental house and wrote and recorded the album in the old fashioned way – face-to-face.
The 15 tracks represent two decades of experience as a working band and the album is something they can be rightfully proud of.
I predict that, despite the circumstances surrounding its release, Wake Up, Sunshine will be their biggest selling album to date.
