The joke about "Hate This Song" is that the members of I Prevail and All Time Low love it. And they loved making it together.
The joint track is a one-off that fuses the former band's metallic ferocity with their Maryland pals' more melodic punk-pop attack. Although as All Time Low's guitar-slinging frontman Alex Gaskarth notes, "We sort of exist in the same relative music sphere and scenes. They're a little heavier than us on a consistent basis, but there was some sort of commonality and like-mindedness going into it."
I Prevail guitarist Steve Menoian concurs that the strange-bedfellows nature of the collaboration was part of its allure for his band. "I used to be critical of bands do collaborations," he confesses. "It always seemed disjointed and messy. Now I get it. It's been an interesting epiphany to realize there's no right or wrong decisions for bands or artists."
"Hate This Song" also comes in the wake of other collaborations for both bands. All Time Low released "Fake As Hell" with Avril Lavigne 13 months ago, hitting the Top 10 on a couple of Billboard charts, while "Can U See Me in the Dark," I Prevail's team-up with Halestorm in advance of their summer tour together, hit number one on the Mainstream Rock survey.
Like "Fake as Hell," All Time Low came up with "Hate This Song" during sessions for its 2023 album, Tell Me I'm Alive. A Part 2 was planned, according to Gaskarth, but changes at its label, Fueled by Ramen, and the end of the quartet's contract there led to a batch of unreleased tracks that the group still wanted to release.
“I had this sort of Police-y sounding, U2-sounding riff that started the song," recalls Gaskarth, who captured it his Fender Telecaster Deluxe through a green Line 6 delay pedal. "That riff was the first thing we sat down and played and we were like, 'Oh, that's interesting. Let's build a song around that. It felt like the kind of thing where if I was standing in a crowd and that thing started playing, that's the big ‘crowd go whoo!' moment. So that was the backbone and basis of the song."
Gaskarth acknowledges that "we weren't even sure if the song was going to see the light of day anymore, but we sent it to the I Prevail guys and said, 'Look, this is a completely out of the blue, kind of random idea. What do you guys think of this song? Is there a world where it makes sense for you guys?' "
Menoian says I Prevail was surprised and "a little bit divided" about whether to do it or not. For his part, however, "I loved the song. It's super sick and catchy from the start. They wanted it to be a 50/50 thing from the start, so we thought, 'Okay, we gotta inject some I Prevail into it." The band's Eric Vanlerberghe sings "Hate This Song”'s second verse, but the bridge is where the Detroit-based group really put its stamp on the track, writing and recording in its home studio in the Motor City.
"We could hear room for something different and heavy in the song," explains Menoian, who along with bandmate Dylan Bowman played a PRS Modern Eagle electric guitar through the Mesa/Boogie amplifiers they use onstage. "The hard part was making the transition out of this pop-punk vibe into something heavy. We wrote a riff that was probably something that wouldn't be heavy enough for something we would do but fell in the mid-dynamic range of heavy with the riff and the way we did the drums. Then we used tape effects to where it glitches out and cuts and then plays back into the song. It was a perfect vibe for the track."
Gaskarth and his bandmates — who previously had an "open-ended bridge" using "a medley of a bunch of old hits songs" as a placeholder — certainly agreed. "What they did made the song so much fun, completely left of center," he says. “They turned it something no one would have expected, which was so great. We really loved it."
While "Hate This Song" gets some love from their respective fan bases, the two bands are on to their next musical adventures. Menoian says I Prevail and producer/engineer Jon Eberhard, who's now playing bass and keyboards with the group, has "got a group of songs that we are feeling very good about and we're getting into the finishing stage right now." Release plans are also being determined, with possible releases independent of an album before the troupe hits the road again in the spring.
All Time Low, which played a series of special 20th anniversary shows this year, has launched its own label, Basement Noise Records, and has been re-recording some of its older material. "We get to reimagine them and re-work them and make them sound like we sound now rather than how we sounded when we were 19-years-old, and our fans have really embraced the idea," Gaskarth says. There are "always new ideas kicking around," he adds, but mostly the band "is gearing up for the next phase, whatever that phase is. There is definitely music on the horizon. It's an exciting time."
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