A chance encounter recently reminded Jack Barakat how far he and his band, the pop-punk quartet All Time Low, have come since their days as Baltimore County high school students more than a decade ago.
As Barakat stood at the Timonium bar Hightopps Backstage Grille, an aspiring, teenage musician let the guitarist know he and his friends hoped to follow in All Time Low's footsteps. The brief conversation stayed with Barakat long after it occurred.
"I felt something on the inside," Barakat, 26, said recently on the phone from a tour stop in Florida. "Honestly, man, that was the coolest thing to hear because that's who we were 10 years ago. We were doing the same exact thing."
Now, after the band's sixth album, "Future Hearts," debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in April, those days seem further away than ever before. The record sales translate live, too, as All Time Low played the biggest show of its career in March at London's 12,740-seat SSE Arena, Wembley. And the accomplishments keep coming: On May 24, the Towson-based band headlines Pier Six Pavilion, a venue it sold out more than a month in advance.
In a genre associated with fast riffs and faster careers, All Time Low is the rare act still reaching new heights more than a dozen years after forming.
"We've just been putting our heads down and working our asses off all these years," singer Alex Gaskarth recently said from the road. "I think not losing sight of why we're in this, and why we're able to do this is really important. Knowing that at any moment, it could all go away has been a big reason we've continued to work as hard as we possibly can."
Following extensive touring in support of their previous album, 2012's "Don't Panic," the band — which also includes drummer Rian Dawson and bassist Zack Merrick, both 27 — realized how fine the line is between working hard and overdoing it. After "touring for seven or eight years nonstop," Barakat said, it was time for a break.
"We figured, 'Let's take time, sit back, unwind and actually look at our career and give people a break from All Time Low,'" Barakat, a Canton resident and co-owner of the Fells Point bar The Rockwell, said.
Gaskarth, too, wondered if the band would benefit from dropping out of view temporarily.
"We had been really grinding it out, almost putting out records maybe too frequently," Gaskarth, 27, said. "It felt like we needed to recharge the batteries a little bit."
All Time Low's discography tells the story of a band averse to slowing down. While still in high school, band members released their first EP, "The Three Words to Remember in Dealing with the End," in 2004. Their full-length debut, 2005's "The Party Scene," received a favorable review from influential website AbsolutePunk. The sophomore album, 2007's "So Wrong, It's Right," featured the band's first notable hit single, "Dear Maria, Count Me In," and the 2009 album "Nothing Personal," kept the fanbase growing to the point a major label was ready to sign All Time Low.
In 2011, the group released "Dirty Work," its first and only album on Interscope Records. The album cover shows Gaskarth spraying a bottle of champagne. Less than four years later, the singer is unafraid to call the decision what it was.
"Interscope was kind of a weird misstep," he said, "but it wasn't something that completely stalled our career."
All Time Low's brief stay with Interscope led them back to Hopeless for "Don't Panic" and "Future Hearts." The latter was recorded over a month and a half last fall at producer John Feldmann's home in Los Angeles, Barakat said. The challenge, band members say, was to expand the band's hook-heavy pop-punk without alienating the existing fanbase.
"There's always been a desire to push forward and progress creatively," Gaskarth, the group's primary songwriter, said. "But that being said, we're not setting out there to create some kind of new sound. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're not going to put out a jazz record."
Feldmann, who fronted the '90s pop-punk band Goldfinger, said a seminal moment in creating "Future Hearts" came halfway through the process during an intense 3 a.m. conversation with Gaskarth. Feldmann wanted to explore songs with more obvious radio appeal. The singer, knowing the recent past with Interscope, was not interested in potentially making the same mistake twice.
"Alex really put his foot down. He was like, 'We had a moment at Interscope Records where we did this and it really didn't work,'" Feldmann said. "In the end, he was right. I think this album became the success that it is because he stayed true to his beliefs."
Barakat hopes incorporating this growth — which can be heard on songs like the folky "Missing You" and the grunge-inspired opener, "Satellite" — into the familiar All Time Low sound will lead the band to the next stage of its career. He points to acts like Green Day and Fall Out Boy — groups who took a raw sound and reconfigured it over time for the masses — as models to follow.
"We look up to those bands, and learn and see how we can do that," Barakat said. "It's taken us a little bit to get there, but we're slowly starting to realize you can stay with the times and stay relevant, and you can have a new sound but still not alienate your fans. I think that's what 'Future Hearts' has done for us."
After the current tour wraps at the end of May, All Time Low will spend the summer touring Europe. For Barakat, playing live is why he joined a band in the first place, and throughout the ups and downs, that has not changed.
"The whole time, we've said all we want to be is touring band. We don't want to be a studio band," he said.
The connection All Time Low has made with its fanbase is immense (more than 3.6 million "Likes" on Facebook is one metric), and the live experience only strengthens that bond, Gaskarth said.
"The real diehard followers of our band like the music, but on top of the music, there's also this other factor of feeling like you're a part of this community. People tell me all of the time that they've met some of their best friends at our shows," Gaskarth said.
With more than 12 years together as a band, All Time Low seems to be doing something right.
"Something in there is still connecting with new people and new audiences," he said. "Even though it's been this slow simmer rather than a flash in the pan, it's working."