“After Midnight” by blink-182

"After Midnight" was the second single blink-182 pulled from Neighborhoods, their sixth album, in September 2011, and it came together very late in the game. The band had scrapped a European tour just to finish the overdue record, most of which they'd cut apart in separate studios, and this one arrived at the last minute, in a rare session with all three in the same room. Travis Barker had a drum pattern he'd tagged "Travis Beat"; Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus heard it and had the song close to done three hours later.

Hoppus and DeLonge wrote their lyrics apart but both landed on romance, a midtempo tale of two damaged people falling for each other. Critics mostly rated it among the band's best, Isaac Rentz filmed lovers sneaking through a youth psychiatric ward for the video, and it stood as the last blink single with DeLonge until he came back in 2022.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.