Welcome back to our semi-regular series Hesitantly Ranked where we take you through all the studio releases by some of our favourite artists and pin their own records against each other in a battle royale where only one reigns superior to the rest.

Today, hot on the heels of their alleged 9th studio album that just arrived on October 20th, 2023, we’re putting loveable SoCal pop-punk brats Blink 182 through the ringer. We’ve been listening to these guys since we were like 12 years old, so, today’s ranking is sure not to come easy.

What I can say prior to giving each record a re-listen, is that I think Blink 182 have generally been one of those bands who has gradually improved with each release. The production and songwriting on Dude Ranch for example is a far cry from Neighbourhoods, and up until that terrible day that Tom left the band, they were always pushing themselves to make a record that surpassed the last – so my prediction is that todays list will follow a similar trajectory.

Here’s our rankings and top picks.

10. Buddha (1994)

Blink 182 have actually only released 9 studio albums, but if you grew up listening to this band you’re probably always a little surprised that the band’s Buddha record is excluded from this list.

Buddha is actually the band’s 3rd demo album and released under Blink, but it was always one that was readily and easily obtainable in record stores – I know because it’s one of the first records I bought with my own money. So I can’t agree even with calling it a demo because distributing a demo record in this way was and remains unheard of. The production on Buddha is already tenfold better than their previous Flyswatter demo and it includes one of the bands most iconic songs of all time – Carousel. This track alone gets it a ranking on this list today and it’s the only one I really care to mention, but like Flyswatter, Buddha’s track list serves as a great introduction to Blink 182’s silly pop-punk style and is a driving force in getting you to like the guys playing them.

Highlight Track: Carousel

9. Cheshire Cat (1995)

It’s their debut studio release and it’s apparent from the very first track here that the band is ready to take themselves just a little bit more seriously and develop an album that sets a real tone. Carousel gets a face lift (and it’s great) and the production difference is pretty apparent, especially when Tom’s vocals enter the mix which while still entirely unrefined are much more present.

This is also the first time we really start to hear the way Tom and Mark’s vocals work together which is important because it becomes such a staple of their sound and arguably the most critical piece that set them apart from other similar sounding skate-pop-punk acts.

Also worth noting here is, while Blink-182 is known for crude humour, it’s just as clear from this debut record that they put just as much attention and their own spin on sappy love songs – another defining character trait that’ll help them win over the female crowd in later years.

Highlight Track: M+M’s

8. Dude Ranch (1997)

Dude Ranch was a big album for Blink 182 because it’s right around the time the band really started to lift off and many long-standing fans will cite this record in particular as the one that solidified them as a fan. It’s also the last record with original drummer Scott Raynor and popular for the constantly reigniting debate “was Blink 182 better with Scott than with Travis?”

They weren’t, but it’s a fun thing to talk about and you definitely can’t deny his influence and role in getting the band to where they are today.

Dude Ranch saw big tracks like Dammit and Josie which propelled Mark Hoppus to the forefront and made it clear that in this band there was two-lead singers and both had their place and purpose.

Production wise, there isn’t a massive leap in sound and style from Buddha to Dude Ranch; it’s overdubbed some, sure, but the production is otherwise pretty minimal and gives it more of a raw sound that tells you “yeah we record in a studio now, but, we’re still just a punk band.” It’s that sound direction that makes these initial releases so popular among the bands punk fanbase; they weren’t trying too hard and you loved them for it.

Highlight Track: Waggy

7. California (2016)

If only for the fact that Tom Delonge isn’t featured on this album, we might’ve placed this album in our faux-10 slot. Its biggest crime? Baring the Blink 182 name. But, the production on this record is solid and if you’re a big fan of Mark Hoppus’ songwriting or Matt Skiba’s vocals, this is a pretty good pop-punk record.

Unfortunately for us, much of the album felt like +44 b-side tracks, like lead single Bored To Death which really lacked the kind of punch we hoped it could have had with childish and unimaginative lyrics like “life is too short to last long.” It also lacks any real distinctive sound from Skiba himself who by his own right has gained a top slot in a-many of our pop-punk/rock hearts with his work in Alkaline Trio. The album might’ve been better served to lean more heavily on Skiba’s influence, instead by the time it’s over you’re just like, “You know what this is missing? Tom.”

Highlight Track: Los Angeles

6. Nine (2019)

Whether it’s because we were already exposed to it in California, hearing Skiba and Hoppus together on Nine feels much more natural. Production wise, this record sits in very much the same wheelhouse as California and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of these tracks were left off that previous release; Lyrically, they follow similar themes, so if you were a fan of that record or Blink-182’s self-titled release, you’ll find comfort in this album. That said, it doesn’t exactly try to break any musical barriers or explore anything terribly new, so it’s a record I don’t find myself missing when I think back to the bands catalogue as a whole and if I’m honest, I sometimes have trouble remembering what tracks even fall on this one. It’s a little forgettable, but when you throw it on, it’s still pretty fun and worlds above the bands earliest releases in terms of writing and production.

Highlight Track: Blame It On My Youth

5. ONE MORE TIME… (2023)

Much like the clouds that cover California and Nine, Blink-182’s most recent release ONE MORE TIME… leaves a little to be desired. It’s the bands first new album that sees the return of Tom Delonge and pop-punk kids everywhere rejoiced at the news, but while similar in sound and texture to the bands explosive Untitled release which took them to entirely new heights in the early 2000’s, ONE MORE TIME… misses the mark… repeatedly.

The problem with ONE MORE TIME… is largely that while we saw significant growth in Tom as a writer with Box Car Racer and Angels and Airwaves, on this record it’s as though he felt pressure to return to the style that made him and Blink a household name. It’s immature, a little crass and littered with that same stage banter that we adored as pre-teens when we’d watch the band’s live performances that we ripped off of LimeWire, but as adults (both us and them) feel cheap and stupid.

Even the album’s lead-off single of the same name which is meant to evoke some level of reflection and introspection within the band who independently dealt with traumatic events and challenging situations from Travis Barker’s terrible plane crash that left him heavily burned and Mark Hoppus’s scare with cancer, they spill out lines like “I wish they told us, it shouldn’t take a sickness or airplanes falling out the sky” as though this is supposed to be some incredible revelation that we shouldn’t have already expected a trio of adult men with grown children to have learned at some point earlier in their lifetime.

Arguably one of the tracks that has garnered more attention is “Terrified” which boasts the fact that it was actually a Box Car Racer b-side (probably because it carries the exact same drum beat as those other two Box Car Racer songs?) and it really begs the question, how many of the rest of these were Untitled or Neighbourhoods b-sides? Because you could have put this entire album on those releases and I’d have been none the wiser.

It’s the album that if ever unclear before showed me that I have long since outgrown this band and perhaps they have long outgrown this particular corner of the music scene.

Highlight Track: Terrified

4. Enema of the State (1999)

Enema of the State was and remains a massive album for Blink fans. It gave us critical tracks like All The Small Things, What’s My Age Again and the arguably the bands most sensitive song to date that helped us see the band as more than a bunch of immature skaters: Adam’s Song.

But it was also full of the same goofy, fun-loving tracks that grabbed us in their earliest releases only now, they’d solidified their sound and tightened up those guitar riffs (at least on record). Anthem, Going Away To College and Dumpweed are all still held in high regard as some of the bands best original tracks that set them far apart from similar bands in the skate-punk scene and Aliens Exist was quite literally vindicated with the recent UFO hearings that saw real testimony from witnesses and experts stating that, actually yeah, aliens are a thing.

Highlight Track: Anthem

3. Neighborhoods (2011)

When the Untitled record came out, it completely changed the way a lot of us viewed Blink 182 and surpassing the expectations left by that record would have been hard even in the best of years, but Neighborhoods hit it out of the park. There’s a certain maturity felt on this record that I think is what makes it stand out among the rest. It seemed to take what Tom learned from his work with Angels and Airwaves and what Mark learned from +44’s When Your Heart Stops Beating and blended both sounds impeccably in a way that still felt fresh and interesting.

Lyrically its the band at its most interesting and coherent and even Travis finds his happy medium with intricate and exciting drum beats that don’t feel like they’re trying too hard to squish through the mix. All in, this album might be Blink’s 10/10.

Highlight Track: After Midnight

If we had a choice in the matter, this might have secured our number 2 slot but…

2. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001)

For me, there’s no Blink record that was as influential as 2001’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. It found me at such a critical time in my own exploration of punk (pop and otherwise) and took such a hold that before long I was listening to every band Tom and Mark were low-key name-dropping all over their interviews and staying up until the wee hours of the night to watch bootleg videos of their live show and it’s one of the records that made me like so many other young kids want to pick up my first guitar and start my first band.

It was melodic, it was punchy, it was snarky, it was… political? (Anthem Pt II). It was filled with teen angst (Shut Up). It was sensitive (Story of a Lonely Guy). And it was a little stupid (Happy Holidays). Each song rolls into the next in a way that’s not at all indicative of a concept album (a term I wouldn’t have understood then anyways) but rather more closely resembles the Roller Coaster of emotions you feel in your early teens when the world begins to collapse both in a way that suggests its so much larger than your home town and yet so much smaller than you could have imagined and things get more and more confusing around you.

Arguably, and I did go back and forth about this quite a bit before embarking down this list, it’s almost firmly tied with Enema of the State, but between Stay Together For the Kids (MASSIVE track when it came out, still hits the sweet spot 20 years+ on), Give Me One Good Reason, The Rock Show, First Date and Anthem Part II, its secured itself firmly in the number 2 slot of this discography breakdown.

Highlight Track: Stay Together For the Kids

1. Blink-182 Self-Titled (2003)

The self-titled record was the bands first real departure in the sound they had spent years cultivating and some fans were undoubtedly apprehensive at first. While they’d clearly been pushing more polished records in recent years and slowly experimenting with different pedals, sounds and textures that all come into full view on this album, not everyone was ready to see Blink in this way. Was it too professional for the loveable California punks? Maybe.

Missing entirely from this record is the immature banter we’d all come to expect from Mark and Tom, their entire teen-selves faded far into the background as they more intimately weave in their sensitive sides and offer a more poetic and introspective look at the experiences and stories they’ve often dipped into but not on such a deep and detailed level.

It’s the album that shows the most growth both as songwriters and people growing up in an increasingly complicated and fast-moving world. It set the tone for what would’ve been an entirely different chapter of Blink-182 records if not for that looming first hiatus that would rock us all to our cores and make the pop-punk community realize that even our biggest superheroes would one day no longer be with us. Until then, they all seemed untouchable and entirely too engrained in the fabrics of our own upbringing for that to have ever been a consideration.

The production on this album is incredible from top to bottom. While I still remember the jarring feeling of first hearing the Stockholm Syndrome Interlude which was unexpected to say the least and on some level, pulled you out of the album that otherwise comes barrelling in like a punch to the face, it showed the bands willingness to experiment and their ability to weave spoken word into a genre of music that didn’t usually favour that type of integration. In the subsequent listens that would follow, I’d grow more and more fond of that piece and believe the album wouldn’t have nearly the same artistic value without it.

This album is a true 10/10 – I don’t think Blink 182 could ever top it.

Highlight Track: Violence

Honourable Mentions

Flyswatter

Flyswatter was technically the bands first release but since they went ahead and stamped it only as a demo, we excluded it from our rankings. The cool part about Flyswatter is that it definitely gives you a taste of what’s to come and serves as a great introduction to Tom’s guitar and vocal style which gets refined through all the bands subsequent releases.

The Mark Tom and Travis Show

Because so much of what drove this bands popularity is tied directly to their live show and the immature stage banter that they indulged us with during it, The Mark Tom and Travis Show deserves some added recognition. As a kid, I personally played this live record more than any of the bands other releases and it was a major talking point among myself and other Blink fans for years. The irony in that is that Blink 182 have never exactly been touted as being a great live band musically, but it became part of their charm and made them feel more relatable to the average listener or perhaps more importantly, to young budding musicians who were just starting their first bands and were shown that it was more important to have fun with the process than it was to be perfect. To me, this will always be the most important aspect of Blink 182’s legacy.

---

Blink 182 is:
Current members
Mark Hoppus – bass, vocals (1992–2005, 2009–present), guitars (2020)
Tom DeLonge – guitars, vocals (1992–2005, 2009–2015, 2022–present), keyboards (2012)
Travis Barker – drums (1998–2005, 2009–present); backing vocals (2003, 2023–present), keyboards, piano (2012, 2018–2019)

Former members
Scott Raynor – drums (1992–1998)
Matt Skiba – guitars, vocals (2015–2022; touring member 2015)

Former touring musicians
Cam Jones – bass (1993)
Mike Krull – drums (1994)
Byron McMackin – drums (1999)
Josh Freese – drums (1999)
Damon DeLaPaz – drums (1999, 2000)
Brooks Wackerman – drums (1999, 2013)
Kevin Gruft – guitars, backing vocals (2021)