REVIEW: All Time Low - 'Wake Up Sunshine'

Written by Ceci Graham

After a brief hiatus and a few side projects, All Time Low have returned to grace us with their new album Wake Up, Sunshine. This glorious 15-track album has a lot to unpack, but for starters it has two very interesting features, the first of which is blackbear on track seven “Monsters”. It also possesses a feature from The Band CAMINO, which in the grand scheme of things is a much safer alternative sounding bet than rapper blackbear. Thankfully even though people have mixed opinions on featuring rappers in emo music, “Monsters” is one of my favorites off of the album so far.

Another aspect of this album I am appreciative of is both how long it is and how not too many singles were released before the album’s release. I am very picky when it comes to the amount of songs a band releases post-announcement, pre-release and All Time Low has managed to appease me and my strange pet peeve.

There isn’t a single song on this album that I am not a fan of yet, there are definitely a few that when I first heard them I was a lot more keen on hitting the repeat button, such as “Pretty Venom (Interlude)” and “January Gloom (Seasons, Pt. 1)”. These tracks possess a certain honesty and raw energy that is encapsulated through Alex Gaskarth’s vocals and the way the guitars are distorted. 

As previously stated, my favorite song on the album thus far is “Monsters”. Everything from the minor chords that are used to the blackbear verse that I honestly expected to hate. As much as I love blackbear and his music separate from All Time Low, I thought that the track was going to be a bit of a miss. However, blackbear and All Time Low worked flawlessly together and that track has definitely taken the cake on this album for me. My one little grievance towards this song however is that during blackbear’s part he adds in a line from one of his older song “Idfc” and as much as that song was a statement in my 2014 playlists, it breaks me out of the daze the song put me in to begin with and I cannot seem to get past it. As small as that is in comparison to the rest of the track, it makes such a weird dent in the song and seems like a lazy throwback to add to such an otherwise strong track. 

Overall, the album is very true to the All Time Low style and is very much like if you were to put a 2020 spin on some of their earlier work. Exemplified in the opening track, “Some Kind of Disaster” compares to their song “Weightless” and how they explore very similar themes within their lyrics. That is very much the core of almost every All Time Low song, the idea of “I’m bad at life. but ok with it”. But it is really a theme that they’ve perfectly unwrapped over the span of a little over a decade and I am incredibly happy with how this album turned out.