New Blink-182 Album Has Grimes, Lil Uzi Vert, & Pharrell

Sophie McNeil

New Blink-182 Album Has Grimes, Lil Uzi Vert, & Pharrell

Sophie McNeil

More than a year ago, when Grimes was still rolling out her Miss Anthropocene album, she mentioned Lil Uzi Vert had tapped her to produce an EP for him but never downloaded the beats she made. Lately they’ve been connecting publicly online about getting “brain chips” — we know Uzi is game for unusual head implants — but there’s been no further talk of their scrapped collab. However, it seems the two weirdo musical geniuses will at least be appearing on the same Blink-182 album.

As Kerrang points out, in an interview with Spotify’s Rock This podcast, drummer Travis Barker says Blink are about 60% done with the follow-up to 2019’s NINE, set for release later this year. Based on Barker’s comments, it sounds like they’ve continued down the previous project’s pop-minded path: “There’s a lot of cool stuff. There’s like a song with Grimes right now that’s really, really cool that I love. There’s a song with Uzi that’s really, really cool that we did with Pharrell.” He clarifies, “I mean, it’s not like Blink’s making a rap song or anything. It’s like bringing Uzi over to our world. So it’s more of a punk kind of like reggae feeling song.”

Barker has a lot of recent experience bringing prominent rappers into the punk-rock realm; he produced Machine Gun Kelly’s pop-punk album and is overseeing a similar project by MGK’s fellow Ohioan Trippie Redd. But if we’re intriguing about what these new Grimes and Uzi x Pharrell collabs might sound like, we’re also suitably terrified.

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