After taking six years off from making music as a band, Good Charlotte returns this month with all new material with their upcoming album Youth Authority. The group is returning to the nostalgic sound of their popular pop-punk records with signature guitar riffs, catchy choruses, and some hidden inside jokes.
Brothers Benji and Joel Madden, the band’s lead guitarist and lead vocalist respectively, have kept quite busy since they last released 2010’s Cardiology. The Maddens have both been judges on The Voice Australia and tag team running their own studio in Los Angeles, where they worked with popular bands currently making it big such as 5 Seconds of Summer and All Time Low.
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Joel Madden, 37, who co-founded the band with his brother when they were teenagers in Maryland, stated to Entertainment Weekly that they felt compelled to return to the band after calling it quits a couple years ago. “We didn’t want to make another record just for the hell of it, or for the money or whatever. But we all felt like we had something to say.”
The boys of Good Charlotte teamed up with famed producer John Feldmann (Blink-182, Panic! at the Disco) to record for two months straight and completed a 12 track album that Joel calls “the best record we made in a long time,” according to Entertainment Weekly.
Joel Madden also mentioned that he thinks the band has something to say with this album. “Good Charlotte was something that we created so that we could belong to something. We just needed some hope…We took six years off and we got to live in our real lives and discover who we were outside Good Charlotte and who we were inside Good Charlotte.”
When asked about the state of pop-punk music and the direction it’s gone from where Madden started, he stated, “I love the genre. It gets dismissed by music critics, but pop-punk is such an important genre. Had I not heard pop-punk music when I was a teenager, I don’t think I would have been confident enough to pick up a guitar and start a band.”
Good Charlotte’s upcoming sixth studio album Youth Authority is set to be released on July 15.
