blink-182 Are About "70 Per Cent" Finished With Their New Album

Drummer extraordinaire Travis Barker has revealed that blink-182 are "about 70 per cent" finished with their new album.

In a new interview with Billboard, the sticksman has given a pretty hefty update on the follow-up to 2016's California, revealing that fans might hear new music in "April, May or June", and that the LP is the closest the pop-punks have come to their 2003 Untitled release.

"I feel like [2016’s] California was similar to [1999’s] Enema Of The State and [2001’s] Take Off Your Pants and Jacket: reestablishing the band, giving fans what they really want and expect from blink," he says. "Now that we got that out of our system naturally, we’re not writing like that this time. It’s more experimental. It’s not like you’re listening and thinking, 'Oh I’ve heard that before, oh I can compare this to this other song.' With this album we’re reestablishing new songs, new rhythms, new ideas.

"Where I look back at California, you could compare Cynical to other fast songs we’ve done. I could put She’s Out Of Her Mind down as a brother-sister record to Rock Show or First Date. The songs on the new album don’t have any brothers or sisters. They don’t sound like anything we’ve done before. Songs on self-titled like Feeling This and I Miss You, I really feel like those didn’t sound like anything blink had touched on before. I just know were doing that again. That’s exciting to me."

This echoes the sentiments of bassist Mark Hoppus, who recently revealed that he too wants to return to the band's mentality of Untitled.

“After playing in this band for 27 years, I want to push it and do different things and take blink to places where we haven’t been before," he told Kerrang!. "We’re really trying to do that on the new record. We want to do with our band what we did in 2003 with Untitled, where we take our foundations and go off in completely weird directions."

Even though Mark has only just unveiled his new Simple Creatures project with All Time Low frontman Alex Gaskarth, he's still hard at work on the next blink record.

“We’re in the studio all the time,” he continues. “That’s the thing, our main bands are our main focus and will always be. We all have our outside interests and our outside things, but we’re pretty straightforward with one another; blink really is everybody’s priority and that’s understood among all of us."

Might as well celebrate this promising news with a spin of this, eh?