All Time Low’s Everyone’s Talking! - A Different Shade of (Under)whelming

Artwork from Apple Music

All Time Low made a startlingly excellent full-length effort with 2020’s Wake Up, Sunshine: An album plagued by its constraints within the COVID-19 pandemic, yet becoming an appropriately healthy ray of sunshine for the group going forward. The baselines they set on this record have been foundational to the group’s most intriguing output since then, as evidenced by 2023’s Tell Me I’m Alive’s most remarkable tracks (Sleepwalking, Modern Love, The Sound of Letting Go) recalling Sunshine’s apt fervor and energy spiced up with a sonic palette that diversifies the group’s mantra. Alive’s biggest sin was that, compared to Sunshine, it struggled to keep up that fervor for a majority of its runtime, and its follow-up, Everyone’s Talking!, presents this same issue in a duller flavor.

Everyone’s Talking!, the band’s first full-length project of new material under their Basement Noise label/imprint, teased out very familiar but resonant singles that tone down the “experimentation” of Alive but bring back the brash, juvenile snark that populated the quartet’s earlier work. SUCKERPUNCH is a kitschy rocker, meshing the swagger of both parts of Seasons with the aggression of, say, Canals, resulting in a triumphantly disdainful lament on shit-talking; neatly typical pop-punk. The Weather is a bittersweet ode to “reverse meet-cutes” bringing with it one of the band’s best hooks alongside the dejected Oh No!, which channels sentiments you would not really expect from a lyrically tumultuous group like All Time Low (“If I built my brand on being sad / Do I need my broken-hearted back?”).

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A handful of other cuts throughout Everyone’s Talking! read similarly, taking bog-standard pop-punk palettes and spicing them up with All Time Low-level energy: Butterflies and Cigarettes & Sabotage have quite fascinating performances and well-crafted hooks that make them hard to hate despite feeling like mosh-fodder. Viva Las Vagus Nerve and the title track are clunkier in this regard, but are, alongside the record’s pre-release singles, among the very few tracks that jolt some thematic imagery that remind listeners that All Time Low are not actually a 1:1 Simple Plan spin-off band, which is a problem that too much of this record possesses. Alive treaded this line too much, but, just like Everyone’s Talking!, this potentially abhorrent songwriting aspect is masked by the myriad of other issues plaguing the record.

Alive has a clear leg above Everyone’s Talking! in its sequencing: Everyone’s Talking! concentrates all of its best material into small chunks, resulting in a much more sluggish listening experience when more of the record’s duds sprawl for prolonged periods of time. Said stumbles lie in a concentration of undercooked and meatless walls of pop-punk noise that lack the rhyme or reason of the singles that teased this record. You’ll find rockers that are amusingly clunky (Bubblegum, Little Bit), unassumingly generic (Falling for Strangers), unsatisfyingly melodramatic (Tread Water, Different Languages), or live in a dance-limbo with New Religion (Sugar, i.e., a track that would feel more rejuvenated should it have landed in The Maine’s discography). This isn’t helped by the incredibly synthetic, overly-loud engineering and mastering, which even Dirty Work executed much better.

Everyone’s Talking! is troubling to assess: The haphazard tinkering that colored much of Tell Me I’m Alive has been omitted in favor of sticking to the group’s strengths in loud guitars and percussion. Though, with much less compositional range and quality oscillations to direct your attention towards, Everyone’s Talking! slots itself into a limbo of confusion. Their least-acclaimed records at least had semi-interesting juxtapositions: Dirty Work sees the band as more of a Corporate Entity™; Last Young Renegade and Tell Me I’m Alive show the band’s commitment to diversifying their sound, despite varying levels of success. When Everyone’s Talking! is good, it recalls the best aspects of their post-2017 work. Otherwise, there’s an extreme pivot to extreme levels of middling and nothing more.

RECOMMENDED TRACKS: SUCKERPUNCH, Oh No!, The Weather, Butterflies

25/10/24

Originally published at https://www.tumblr.com on October 24, 2025.