They are already on tour in Europe and lead singer Tom DeLonge tweeted (or “posted”, as it is now officially known on X/Twitter) on 26 August that new Blink-182 “music video(s) and album are only weeks (days) away”. So it is hardly a shock to the system that they are ramping up the teasing of it all now.
Various posters with the band’s logo have shown up in Toronto, something that was picked up on and posted about by an Italian Blink-182 fan account on X/Twitter (after supposedly getting a tip from a Reddit user called am_dog).
The posters have the band’s logo and the phrase “ONE MORE TIME…” with lyrics printed in lighter text below them. The fan speculation is that they are the title of, and the lyrics from, the first new track from the album.
That’s the predictable – and maybe contrived – part of it all (just HOW did those fans discover this?), but the more interesting part is the QR code on the posters and what they lead to (or, rather, what they don’t lead to).
You arrive at a “stall” page on the band’s official site, which looks like a wall of urinals with Blink-182 stickers on the tiled wall and a tiny TV screening some of their videos. There is also a command to text a specific number written on the wall “for a good time” (but we were much too scared to text it). Fans of the “crude male genitals daubed on a wall” school of street art are also well catered for here.
There is, more intriguingly, a sticker right in the middle of the wall saying “Employees Must Connect To Spotify” along with the streaming service’s logo. Clicking on it takes users to a pre-save page.
There is also a digital clock that is eventually placed beside the TV that is flashing at “12:00” suggesting that it will eventually start a countdown to the release of new music. (Clicking on it also changes the time to… 1:82.)
The video playing on the “stall” page is fittingly grubby – you can almost smell the damp vileness of the urinal – and ties into the band’s knowingly juvenile and scatological schtick, so bonus marketing points for the (horrible) attention to detail here.
