“We love the idea of becoming a more mainstream”

The pop-punk ghetto is a crowded place these days, but it has its escape routes. Maryland’s All Time Low was the great white hope for the much-maligned genre when Alternative Press named the four-piece as its band of the year for 2008. Six months later, ATL’s third album, Nothing Personal, revealed an outfit outgrowing the influence of cretinous has-beens like Blink-182.

The solid first single “Weightless” gets its three chords in the right order, but a playful ’80s vibe creeps into the picture with tracks like “Damned If I Do Ya (Damned If I Don’t)”, not least because it lifts the intro from Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”.

Vocalist-guitarist Alex Gaskarth is genuinely amused by the comparison. “Nice! That’s awesome,” he laughs, calling the Straight from Boise, Idaho. “To be completely honest, I can’t say we pinpointed it quite that hard, but in writing the record it definitely came down to the science behind what makes a song great. And I honed in on what I thought was the best of the ’80s, ’90s, and the early 2000s, and that’s what I tried to pull from.”

ATL took what Gaskarth calls a “hip-hop approach” to Nothing Personal, not only working with a number of pop punk’s stalwart producers—like Matt Squire, Butch Walker, and David Bendeth—but also pogoing into a different universe entirely, for a collaboration with Rihanna hitmaker The-Dream. A smooth and understated slice of blue-eyed boy-band soul called “Too Much” was the controversial result.

“As of right now, it’s the least popular song, based on kids buying the tracks on iTunes,” says Gaskarth, “but I think people will come to appreciate it and realize there’s a little more to this band than what they’re familiar with. And that was the idea of the song: to shock people and to remind them that we’re not a one-trick pony. We can write outside of our comfort zone. It’s something we really want to do. You can’t write the same songs forever.”

These are encouraging words from the frontman of a group that took its name from a New Found Glory lyric, as is Gaskarth’s admission that “we love the idea of becoming a more mainstream, household-name kind of band.” And while the 21-year-old vocalist believes it’s also important not to alienate ATL’s current fans, it definitely takes some ’nads to “swing for the fence”, as Gaskarth puts it, at precisely the time most would settle for a simple base hit. This is the year, after all, that ATL finds itself headlining at Warped.

“I know,” Gaskarth says. “I remember our first year helping to build the East Coast Indie Stage. Going from there to here is a really good feeling.”

Source: straight.com

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