Lifeforms

Seven years since their last full-length album, 2014’s *The Dream Walker*, the arena art rock band Angels & Airwaves return—and a lot has happened in their absence. AVA frontman Tom DeLonge quit blink-182, the genre-defining California pop-punk band he cofounded in 1992; released a debut solo album titled *To the Stars… Demos, Odds and Ends*; dropped some films and books; and founded an entertainment and aerospace company, also called To the Stars, best known for releasing footage of UFOs three years before the Pentagon chose to declassify it. (Now his company collaborates with the United States Department of Defense.) As diehard fans know, DeLonge’s interest in space mirrors his fascinations with musical performance, so it’s no wonder that Angels & Airwaves’ sixth studio album, *Lifeforms*, sounds galactic, a whirlwind of cosmic synths and sweeping production not unlike LCD Soundsystem recorded on Mars. And it almost didn’t happen. “There was a time, not that many years ago, I didn’t know if I was going to play music anymore,” DeLonge told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. A “crazy divorce,” a departure from blink-182, working with “people from the government” on extraterrestrial research, and the COVID-19 pandemic left the musician feeling misguided. Then he made an accompanying movie for *Lifeforms* and his ambitions were given an identity: “It just ended up becoming everything Angels & Airwaves was meant to be—this transmedia art project about humanity.” At the center is the record, a collection of songs that ascend to some final frontier: from the post-hardcore, ringing guitars of “Euphoria” and the jangly anti-NRA anthem “No More Guns” to the dark-wave-lite “Spellbound,” The Cure-inspired “Automatic” (Robert Smith was on a blink-182 song, after all), and romantic coda “Kiss & Tell.” “If anything, I just do what I want, and that\'s the most punk-rock thing that I have in my DNA,” DeLonge tells Apple Music. “And I know that people don\'t get it, but it doesn\'t really matter to me, because I know what I\'m doing for the most part, 90%.”

Aside from the odd reference to aliens, this album from the Tom DeLonge-fronted band finds them down to Earth, putting this world to rights

Tom DeLonge’s Angels & Airwaves continue their journey to the stars on expansive sixth album, LIFEFORMS…

There’s enough for fans to enjoy across ‘Lifeforms’, but it is not as lofty as it perhaps thinks itself to be.

Arriving seven years after 2014's The Dream Walker, Angels & Airwaves' sixth studio album, 2021's Lifeforms finds lead singer/songwriter Tom DeLonge further expanding his love of anthemic '80s-style alt-rock and synth pop. The extended hiatus from recording was due in part to DeLonge's work with To the Stars, his paranormal and UFO research company. And while he continues to weave alien and supernatural themes into his work on Lifeforms, the album is one of the band's most grounded. It's also one of his most rock-oriented productions. Where some of the group's past albums showcased more of a keyboard-based sound, on Lifeforms DeLonge purposefully amps up the guitars, a sound that evokes the driving punk and emo pop of his work with blink-182 and Box Car Racer. This is especially true on the rousing and cathartic "No More Guns," a stomping punk flag waver in which DeLonge ruminates on the negative effects of gun culture, racism, and police brutality. Equally compelling is "Automatic," an infectious update of Joy Division's "Ceremony" and Modern English's "Melt with You" that still conjures its own effusive atmosphere.

Ellis Heasley reviews the long-awaited new album from Tom DeLonge's Angels & Airwaves. Read his review of Lifeforms here!

Angels and Airwaves - Lifeforms review: I cannot sleep I cannot dream tonight