What does Future Hearts mean to you and how do you feel about the album?
To be honest, this album has like a good summertime feel to it. It’s a throwback to us growing up, to all of us being in high school, going to college—it’s a story about being young, how we started our band and where we came from. You know after having six albums out, you kind of have to switch it up lyrically. Our last albums have been about where we are at the time, where we’re 25, 26, 27 years old and where we are now, but this album’s a little more about where we came from and what it was like exploring the world for the first time and being really young.

Have you ever had a desire to make a darker album?
I don’t foresee us ever making a complete record in that vein just because that’s not us. That’s not who we are. I don’t know if darkness is in us. We’re all pretty happy people. We’re fun, easy-going people so I don’t know if we have that kind of angst in us. We all get along really well. There’s no inner-band struggle. I think that’s where a lot of those kind of songs comes from.

You almost had Mark Hoppus on your album Nothing Personal but the track was never completed. How did he make it onto your song ‘Tidal Waves’?
He’s been the member of Blink-182 that we’ve been closest with since we first started touring, and we tweeted pictures of our Blink tattoos and he hit us up. We’ve been staying in contact with him ever since. When he lived in England we spent a lot of time touring there and we got close with him and his family. We got close with him as people, not only as a band but as humans and so when it got to the point where we were doing this album, we asked ourselves if we wanted any guests. We’ve never been the band to do that. We’ve had a couple guests here and there, we’ve had close friend here and there but we’ve never reached for a big influence on a big album.
We were like, let’s just hit up Mark and see what he says. Alex emailed him and he immediately responded with, “I’d love to.”
We went to his house (Hoppus moved back to LA when Blink-182 reunited). It was me, Alex our singer, Rian our drummer and Megan, who takes pictures for us. We were in his studio right next to his kitchen and he recorded the vocals and we kicked it for a while and it was pretty awesome… a pretty incredible experience.

Are you happy with what Mark brought to the table?
It definitely brings the song to the next level and the song is kind of like pop-rock-ballad-y. It’s actually probably one of, if not my favorite song that we’ve ever done. His voice lends itself so well to the verse and the lyrics. I think everyone is going to be blown away.

When you go to dinner with Mark, where do you go? Fast food or five-star?
For being the singer of one of, if not the biggest pop-punk bands of all time, he’s kind of a fancy dude. He likes the finer things in life. He likes good wine, good food, he likes European history—it’s just so funny to see that side of him because I grew up thinking this guy’s running around in his underwear, naked on the streets. We actually ate dinner at Parliament in London. So us and Mark befriended a guy, Nigel Adams, who’s a member of Parliament, who just loves rock music, and so the dinner ended up being Nigel and his family, Mark and Skye , and me and Alex, alongside members of the British government. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

How did Benji and Joel Madden get involved in this album?
They’re very close with us and Feldman and you know we have the Maryland thing with them—they were kind of mentors to us when we first started doing big tours. Alex asked if they wanted to write some songs with us on the album so Benji and Joel came in and wrote two songs with John and Alex. One of them is called “Bail Me Out,” which has got a Good Charlotte vibe but also is a little more mellow so it’s in vein of—it’s got a Third Eye Blind vibe to it. It just really lends itself for Joel to sing on it. It’s almost like a duet. There’s a lot of back-and-forth between Alex and Joel which I always love in a song.

Whose idea was the zombie-themed “Something’s Gotta Give” video?
We loved the videos that the director, Chris Marrs Piliero, has done in the past. He’s done so many great videos for The Black Keys, Britney, and we were so excited that he wanted to work with us so we asked him to write a treatment. The thing that stuck out to him about the song was the lyric “dying to live.” He’s like, “What if we do a funny play on zombies?”
His concept was Alex is a zombie but he doesn’t realize it. And, he’s chasing this girl and you think that he’s running from a dude wearing a french fry costume working outside a burger place… but she’s actually running away because he’s a zombie. And once he realizes it, he has a flashback and sees himself eating all of us, who then turn into zombies. I think it’s a pretty fun video.

During the process of filming the video, did you ever consider opening a real burger joint called Slappy Joe's?
We were talking about it. And I love sloppy joes! You don’t really find many sloppy joes places. Wouldn’t that be incredible?