By Jordan Bickham

Staff Writer

Blink182’s popularity as a pop-punk band was booming in 2005, when suddenly, the band announced an indefinite hiatus. While the band wasn’t breaking up, this announcement was horrible news to its thousands of devoted fans.

After taking a few years to reflect upon life to and mature as musicians, the group is back and better than ever, coming out with a new hit album and a United States concert tour.

Guitarist and vocalist Tom Delonge started another band, Angels and Airwaves, during the break. With hits such as “The War” and “The Adventure,” the band has become immensely popular during Blink182’s absence, but that’s about to change.

Blink182’s new album Neighborhoods hit iTunes and stores around the U.S. on Sept. 27, already attracting thousands of fans. Neighborhoods is receiving positive reviews on iTunes with an average of 4.5 stars out of 3,957 reviews. Not only is it receiving positive reviews from its fans, but also from music critics. Music critics, such as MTV’s James Montgomery, have called Neighborhoods “one of the band’s most distinct albums to date.”

Not only has the group come back with a great album, but it has also brought back the talent with a concert tour of the U.S. with My Chemical Romance. The band recently visited Dallas at the Gexa Energy Pavilion on Sept. 27, the same day Neighborhoods was released. The concert was a great success and helped the band reach all its fans again.

While Neighborhoods is quite different from the group’s previous albums, it still sounds like the original Blink from six years ago (mostly thanks to Delonge’s distinctly high and nasally vocals). Though the group sounds the same, the album is definitely darker and more musically complex than anything they have done before. In previous albums, the band boasted bright pop anthems the group was previously known for, but now it goes for tracks that are heavier and hard hitting.

Many believe the dark sound of the album stems from the difficulties the group dealt with during its break. In the duration of eight years, the group suffered the deaths of two close friends, and in 2008, Travis Barker, the group’s drummer, was seriously injured in a plane crash that killed four others. Needless to say, the band has earned the right to be serious and dark. It’s as if they crammed in eight years worth of doubt, darkness, and death into the deluxe album’s 49-minute running time.

Lyrically, the album is the most depressing thing Blink182 has ever done, with death being the prominent theme in almost every song. It shows up in “Hearts All Gone” (“let’s drink ourselves to death”), in “Natives” (“maybe I’m better off dead”), in “After Midnight” (“standing close to death”), and even in the first single “Up All Night’s” chorus (“all these demons/they keep me up at night”).

That said, the album is not completely gloomy, with bopping songs such as “Wishing Well” and catchy tunes such as “Love is Dangerous” and “Up All Night,” retaining some of the group’s former sound.

The album represents a band maturing in both its ability and confidence while keeping the core spirit of the group constant. Like Montgomery said, “Blink182 has grown up, mostly because life forced them to, and willing or not, that maturity fits.” While the album shows a different, darker side to Blink182, it still contains the group’s catchy and impressive talent that it’s known for.