Also, extra point for casually name-dropping their own name. I like how the opening backing vocals also appear in the chorus, and how the verses start kind of spoken before the melody changes and becomes gentler with “I wanna drive this car over the edge.” I don’t know what the effect is that they added in the pre-chorus, but it makes the song faint slightly enough only for the chorus to have a bigger impact. Juana Giaimo: “Once In a Lifetime” sounds familiar but also fresh, showing that pop-punk doesn’t need to be attached to trap to be alive today. Are they going for nostalgia, pandemic angst or straight-up sauce? What’s most frustrating is how All Time Low is swimming in emotions on this track. I can’t help but cringe at the name-drop in each chorus. The 10-second lede throws away my concentration and foreshadows the hook, which is a forced burst of emotion inconsistent with the delivery of the verses. If the single began with the opening couplet of “I wanna drink, wanna think, write a song about it/I wanna smoke, make a joke, try to hide the damage” it would have been a thousand times more compelling. The lackadaisical intro, where Gaskarth belts the song title twice while backing vocals are overdubbed underneath it, is just unnecessary. Jackie Powell: After the triumph that was “Monsters,” a single that found a way to integrate Alex Gaskarth’s soaring vocal alongside blackbear without transforming it into a hip-hop edgelord crossover, “Once in a Lifetime” is All Time Low coming back down to earth. But the verses rock about as hard as Twenty One Pilots, and ain’t nobody got time for that. Thomas Inskeep: If the whole of “Once in a Lifetime” sounded like its chorus, this would be about a, because there, All Time Low successfully plumb the early ’00s emo/Warped Tour sound of their genesis. Instead, it wrings good energy out of self-pity - and isn’t that the miracle of all great emo-adjacent pop punk? If it weren’t for the tune’s barrelling momentum denying you a moment to think about how hackneyed it all is (notice how the title drop at the end of the chorus rides on a single note, denying the end of the chorus any proper resolution as if eager to get to the beginning of the next one) it’d probably start to stew in its own downer narrative. These are deliciously inelegant couplets to base an entire song off of. The half-rhymes, in particular, ride a fine line between graceful and groan-worthy, especially considering how they’re used to emphasize syncopated half-beats, like the singer’s particularly proud of them: “Life time” / “Right time,” “Forget you” / “Pretend to”, “We had” / “This bad?,” and grab “Loneliness” / “Another mess” from the second verse, while you’re at it. This song is unabashedly a flimsy wrapper around one of the most immaculate pop-punk choruses in recent memory. Tim de Reuse: The verses are cut as short as they’ll go, the mix compressed is to drum-and-bass levels, and the tempo is fast so you spend as little time as possible in the boring parts. Katie Gill: A Fueled by Ramen song in the year of our Lord 2021 that sounds pretty damn close to a Fueled by Ramen song from the year of our Lord 2011. The logical next step in name-dropping: a single called “ Jon Bellion“…
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