EXCLUSIVE: All Time Low On Keeping New Label A Secret: 'It Didn't Feel Like The Right Time'

Late last month, news emerged that Maryland pop punk lords All Time Low had left longtime label Hopeless Records and had signed to Fueled By Ramen, all on the down low. Today, speaking to The Music, frontman Alex Gaskarth elaborated on the move, confirming that it was "totally amicable".

"We changed labels just because it felt like the right time and the right move. It was totally amicable, those guys and gals have been and are our partners in business for years and years and years and through the ups and the downs, and we don’t have a bad thing to say about them — they were and are incredible," Gaskarth says.

"It was really just that our contract with them expired and we were free agents again and we decided to see what was out there. Fueled By Ramen approached us and that was a label we showcased for first in our entire career, a long long time ago. It didn’t work out then and we watched from afar — we know all the people over there that work with the label and they’ve become our good friends in the industry so if we were gonna move families, they felt like the right place to go," he explains.

The band had been with punk label Hopeless Records for nearly a decade, for four of their six full-length records. Gaskarth states the reason to keep the label change secret was more business-oriented, rather than a deliberate attempt to keep fans in the dark.

"We were still promoting our last record and we had a DVD that came out, it didn’t seem like the right time to tell people we were onto this new thing when we still had current things happening, y’know?"

All Time Low are due to release their new album, Last Young Renegade, on 2 June, and will head to Australia for a national tour this May. Pre-order it here.

Keep an eye out on The Music for our full interview with All Time Low.