So, did you know that they released a new American Pie film in 2020? It’s a female-led one, this one, presumably as a means of grafting on a cell of advancement to the withered bones of the ‘2000s sex-comedy’ formula. It’s also bad and isn’t worth knowing about.
It does, however, throw up some parallels with Good Charlotte—also inextricably linked to that era and featured on the series’s soundtracks—and their new album Motel Du Cap. This is also a work whose creators want to embrace the current timbre of their medium, while simultaneously clinging onto the spirit of their youngest and most hopeless selves from 2002. For men in their mid-40s making pop-punk, that’s probably not a good idea. In this case, you get left with Joel Madden’s nasal register that can sound childish instead of childlike, and the misguided perception that an ‘urban’ slant makes them cool. After all, what hip-and-happenin’ band in 2025 wouldn’t want to collaborate with Wiz Khalifa?
It’s even more deflating to have that coming directly after Generation Rx, which was overall darker, more serious and better than literally anyone could’ve expected. Then you remember how that came seven years ago and was a pretty resounding commercial flop, and the Madden brothers’ current standing as industry bigwigs would deem another one like it to be simply unacceptable. As such, Motel Du Cap employs many of the same tactics as pop-punk’s other quadragenarians in their own comebacks and relevance-grabs. There are the chunkier throwbacks like Stepper and Mean that are good. There are also astringent, plastic alt-pop cuts like Life Is Great that…aren’t. And then there’s the final leg that hammers down on the Misty-Eyed Nostalgia button, but carries the vibe of Good Charlotte bowing out with pride and riding into the sunset, for some reason.
That last part gets even more confusing when Motel Du Cap doesn’t carry much grand significance at all. It’s a very small album, both in scope and in the resources at its disposal. For the latter, its guest stars feel like substitutes for the bigger, higher-profile presences that Good Charlotte could almost certainly afford. For a guest rapper, Wiz Khalifa’s price point can’t exactly be sky-high these days; Zeph is like LØLØ at home; Luke Borchelt is a lab-grown variant of literally any B-to-C-list country singer; and Petti Hendrix must be giving his services away, because there’s no shot someone who sounds as terrible as he does would be getting business otherwise.
The band themselves don’t fare much better, as previously mentioned in relation to Madden’s voice, though it’s worth reiterating how, for a song called Life Is Great, he’s incapable of embodying any grand joy or exuberance in the shrunken, pitiful mewl he’s locked in. As for the others, guitars are regularly hemmed into a brittle range, and outside of a surprisingly prominent thrum at the eleventh hour on GC Forever, bass presence is negligible. It might be Dean Butterworth’s drumming that gets shafted the most, though, routinely shafted of weight or any organic body to speak of. The puttering, wimpy pats calling themselves drum work on Deserve You might as well come from Butterworth slapping a beat on his belly.
And yet, even with all of that, there are outliers that find Good Charlotte swing around with tremendous haste and get it right…in the context of what they’re doing overall. On Motel Du Cap, The Anthem or Lifestyles Of The Rich & Famous are a ways away from being recreated, but it’s nice to intermittently break the tradition of older pop-punks misunderstanding their fundamental appeal nonetheless. Stepper sounds like—gasp!—a song that’s in touch with its roots, and along with Mean and Vertigo (minus Petti Hendrix’s numbing feature on the latter, of course), make up disparate safety blanket threads that it’s nice to at least acknowledge. Even the lockstep synth-rock of Bodies has some historical precedence going for it, as the newest coming of what was explored on 2007’s Good Morning Revival.
The problem there, however, is that it’s just one part of an album that’s trying to do more. No, really; it is trying to do more. This is where the businessman side of Good Charlotte comes out, and how it connects the dots of Motel Du Cap with lucrativeness at the fore. You’ve got the old stuff touched upon; you’ve got the genre’s current hotness (or as ‘current’ as you’re willing to allow for in its newest waning state); and you’ve got the more settled, easy-going pastorality of a Good Charlotte decades in. Put it all together and it feels like nothing. It’s flavourless pop-punk fluff, where the broad, uncomplicated appeal of disenfranchised childhoods (Rejects) or gooily happy relationships (Life Is Great, Deserve You) supersedes specificity or believable conflict. Yes, there may be a splinter of added meaning beneath I Don’t Work Here Anymore, but at the end of the day, you’re still listening to multi-millionaire Ink Master host and son-in-law of Lionel Richie Joel Madden complain about working a dead-end nine-to-five.
Though, really, what more would you expect from this, an equivalent to a late-period American Pie sequel? Meticulous adhesion to the formula plus the right drop of contemporaneity makes a product like this, and doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it is a product. This is their first album in more than half a decade, after any and all activity had slowed to a crawl; how much creative sincerity is a driver here? At the same time, there have been worse attempts at similar revivals, though that says more about where Good Charlotte are overall. Outside of their canonised classics, they’re no strangers to cloying artificiality, and Motel Du Cap is certainly another helping of that. If you were expecting a new fire to be lit under Good Charlotte (like it seems they themselves were), you might have another seven-year wait in store.
For fans of: blink-182, All Time Low, Simple Plan
‘Motel Du Cap’ by Good Charlotte is released on 8th August on Atlantic Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
