A Combo Of Blink-182 & All Time Low Might 'Piss People Off' With Simple Creatures

“It’s all deeply upsetting,” jokes Simple Creatures' Alex Gaskarth of the duo’s recent Thanks, I Hate It music video; a clip that uses deepfake technology to superimpose his face and that of his bandmate, blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, onto an array of cheesy infomercials to horrifying effect. The clip captures the duo’s essence and self-proclaimed “trash-pop” brand perfectly, with humour smashing headfirst into organised chaos.

Since announcing the project back in January, the All Time Low frontman and his partner-in-crime have dropped two EPs, Strange Love in March and Everything Opposite in early October, the latter of which features Thanks, I Hate It and dark synth-pop earworm One Little Lie, which also recently received the music video treatment.

“We got to the [studio] and it wasn’t until we walked in that Mark went, ‘Hey, I’ve been here before,’” Gaskarth recalls. “And then he thought about it for two more minutes and went silent for a while and went, ‘I know what it is! We shot [blink-182's What’s My Age Again?] here.’ So it’s kind of cool to be continuing the legacy.”

At the time What’s My Age Again? was released, Gaskarth was a couple of years shy of discovering blink-182 with The Mark, Tom And Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back!). “I was already starting to dive into rock and punk rock and these genres that set me on a path of wanting to be in a band myself,” he explains. “It was that record and a couple of other live albums that really put me onto this idea of wanting to get up in front of people and actually do that.

“At that point, it was not just about this music that I had been connecting with for a long time, it was also about the intangible energy that you suddenly discover only in live records and live shows, where it’s like, ‘There's a real energy here and they’re connecting with people and they’re having fun.’ Suddenly, that was everything to me: ‘That’s what I want to do, that’s what I’ve got to do.’”

It was those live recordings that put Gaskarth on a path that would see him not only befriend Hoppus, but later become his collaborator. “[All Time Low] had some lucky occurrences after lucky occurrences and worked our arses off and we sort of had enough good fortune to get in front of people like Mark and some of the people that we grew up idolising,” he says. “At the time, I think Mark saw some of himself in us. It’s always cool when you see new bands coming up and doing what you probably inspired – it’s a nice full-circle thing to see, as an artist, that you’ve made an impact in some way, because, really, when you make music, that’s all you want.”

The first time Gaskarth and Hoppus found themselves in a room together working on music was for All Time Low, and while that tune “didn’t see the light of day”, it did set them on a “path to a friendship that has blossomed into what you see now”.

The DIY, easygoing nature of Simple Creatures is really what defines the band. Having fronted All Time Low since 2003, Gaskarth had to adjust his songwriting style for Hoppus. 

“From the moment I have some inkling of what I want to write about, I’m already overthinking it, so I think [Hoppus] is a nice kind of balance for me,” he says. “I’ve learnt a lot about his writing sensibility, his ability to sort of craft lyrics out of the ether and not overthink what he’s saying right out of the gate. One of my biggest takeaways from working with him is to just go into every song without too much second-guessing. You can second guess it later.

“Every now and then, even with my own writing for All Time Low and stuff, I’ll realise that I’m hitting that wall and getting to the point where it’s like, ‘Ok, you’re probably overthinking this – knock this wall down and continue on.’ And, more often than not, now that I remind myself of those things, I find that it really helps me get to the next step. It’s a valuable tool to have.”

It wasn’t only Gaskarth who had to break away from his comfort zone a little, with some fans of each member’s respective projects also taking time to adjust. “People want what they’re comfortable with and it becomes that conversation of band versus brand.

“When you’ve been in a band for a long time, you have to get out of your own way, as far as, there’s a brand and a known thing and something that people expect from you and I think that it’s important to not obsess over that too much – you have to make the music that feels true to you at the time, whether or not that pisses some people off," he says. “We wanted to tread new ground and do something completely different, and I think it just took people a little while to come to terms with how it wasn’t necessarily what they expected when they found out about the project.”

As far as Simple Creatures’ development since the start of the year, Gaskarth says they’re just “having fun with it” and not overthinking its progress or direction.

“The project’s turning into this weird amalgam, trashy-pop thing that we get to explore the soundscape of and kind of create it as we go," he says. “We sort of jokingly named it ‘trash-pop’ one day and that’s really stuck, and what I love about that is, arrogantly making up our own joke name for a genre is perfect for this, because I don’t know that we ever want it to fit in a genre, or for people to have some kind of expectation of what that genre is going to sound like.

“We want to be able to mould it to what we feel like doing at the time, because that’s the nature of this project – that’s exactly what this project is supposed to be: fluid and experimental.”

After the duo pops into Australia for Good Things Festival on the east coast, they’ll be trying to lock down more studio time for Simple Creatures. “There’s still more music kicking around, there are plans to get back in the studio and continue writing, continue working, so there will be, at some point, an album,” he reveals. “It’s up in the air because Mark and I both have our ‘side project’,” he laughs. “So we’re fitting these in as we can and as we can get together and actually sit down in the studio.”

Aussie fans attending Good Things can expect a show that’s “somewhere between an electronic show and a rock show”.

“We aren’t shying away from the fact that it’s not a band, it’s Mark and I, and we create a lot of this music on computers and with synths and stuff like that, so we really lean into that live,” he explains. “I think, again, just like learning about Simple Creatures, people come into the shows not knowing exactly what to expect and then after the first song everybody is like, ‘Oh yeah, fuck, I’m in!’

“It’s a party and we have a good time and it’s fun to translate these songs live and do it in front of people, because I think that, with any kind of music, that’s when you really know that you’re onto something. The second we heard people singing these songs back, we were like, ‘Ok, great. The energy is there; we did something right – we’re good to go.’”