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Music

Blink-182 Want to See Some Naked Dudes, Release Short, Annoying Song to That Effect

It's called "Built This Pool" and it is not good.

There are plenty of reasons to be uncomfortable with Blink-182’s continued existence. It’s weird, for example, that Tom DeLonge, one third of a band that relied so heavily on its three distinct personalities and styles, is absent. Very loudly, passive-aggressively absent. The situation is a public mess, Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba has filled the gap that DeLonge left behind and now they’ve got a new album, California, due out in July.

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The whole thing's a little sad. “Bored To Death,” the first track from California, possessed some of Blink’s essential qualities, chunky power chords and inquisitive hooks. Just for a moment, it was seductive. But the lyrics were almost unbelievably childish, the sound of a grown-ass man trying to comprehend his existence through high school journal rhymes.

And now this. A 14-second song called “Built This Pool” that they’ve decided to put on a ten hour fucking loop because apparently we haven’t all suffered enough as a generation. The lyrics to the song are as follows: “I wanna see some naked duuuuudes/ That’s why I built this poooool.” Mark Hoppus strains his voice up to a “Woo-oo” a couple times too for some reason. “Is that really it?” a voice asks at the end. You bet it is, man!

I saw Blink when they reunited five years ago at a show at London’s Brixton Academy. Everyone in the room was too cool to go to the front until Travis Barker descended from the ceiling playing the intro to “Feeling This” and everybody—everybody—lost it. That’s what this band is capable of when they fancy it. But as the night wore on, there began to be something weird about seeing a bunch of grown men make dick jokes between every song with an audience that was mostly out of puberty standing in front of them. Their kids were cross-legged at the side of the stage. Nobody really wanted to hear the dick jokes and I don’t know that the band enjoyed making them, but there they were, making dick jokes anyway.

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And now this. Naked dudes! Can you imagine? With their dicks and balls and butts and stuff.

That 2003 self-titled record was a genuine statement that Blink could evolve and turn themselves into an important rock band and 2011’s Neighborhoods, while flawed, had some good stuff, maybe even a blueprint when you dusted it off. There’s absolutely no sign so far that California can recapture any of that.

Listen to the track below out of sheer curiosity and then turn it off after 14 seconds.

Alex Robert Ross spent two years trying to draw the Blink logo onto his schoolbooks but never quite nailed it. Follow him on Twitter.