It's a pretty precocious move to open your debut single at 17 years old by telling the world that "Life's like this."
Nearly 20 years later, one of the first lines Avril Lavigne delivers on "Bite Me" — the lead single of her seventh studio album, Love Sux — is: "You should've known better / Better to fuck with someone like me." Allow her to reintroduce herself, no less unabashed.
"I mean, I'm the same person," Lavigne says to Exclaim! over Zoom. "I'm a woman now. I've gone through life experiences and I'm just a little older and wiser. I feel like the same person," she repeats, unintentional emphasis added by the pink streaks in her platinum blonde hair à la 2007's The Best Damn Thing. She wears a black hoodie that wouldn't look out of place with the cargo pants and tank tops she frequented in the early aughts, with dark rings of smoked-out kohl liner still encircling her piercing blue eyes.
Critics condemned her as a teenage girl marketing a fabricated punk aesthetic: an antidote to the bubblegum pop stylings of contemporaries like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Par for the course of being a young woman in the public eye, her authenticity was questioned — but Lavigne knows she's built a career spanning decades on refusing to be anything but herself.
"I think that I was very genuine and I was very authentic, and that's what people connected with the most," she counters, referencing her exemplary early fashion choices. "I was literally wearing clothing right out of my closet, not from photoshoots," including her dad's neck ties and vintage T-shirts emblazoned with the names of the sports teams she played on growing up. She encouraged a generation to not only also raid their fathers' tie collections, but accept her earnest pleas to posers everywhere: "Take off all your preppy clothes."
Fitting in was seemingly never a concern for Lavigne, and that's what was so admirable about her. But it wasn't easy: she dug in tooth and nail against industry pressures to be exactly who she was — and still is — as an artist.
"I fought really hard to write songs on my first album [2002's Let Go]," she explains, "because I was so young, people thought that I maybe wouldn't." The now-37-year-old Lavigne recalls that the producers she was working with at the time were all trying to pitch her stuff that she didn't like. "I really stood my ground and pushed to be a songwriter," she says, "and I'm so glad I did."
As the old adage goes, the rest is history: packaged in the spunky trappings of tight pop-punk hooks, the originality and organic content of her material (and okay, maybe that weirdly elaborate rumour about her being replaced by a clone named Melissa) became her calling card.
"It became the sound that I broke out onto the scene with and people really connected with it," she adds, "and I think that they did because it was truly so authentic to me. I was writing songs about skater boys!" Freshly out of high school, Lavigne really did love skateboarding. "Those were the types of guys I had crushes on," she shrugs, "and that was one of my biggest songs." It's a disarmed relatability that the pop music machine could never replicate.
But she couldn't stay there forever. Recent albums found Lavigne straying from the pop-punk sounds of her earliest releases. "Coming off of the last record [2019's Head Above Water], with it just having been a lot deeper, introspective and emotional," she explains of her later artistic turns, "I wanted to have a lot of fun with this album."
Having fulfilled her latest record contract and being without a manager, she had zero contractual obligations to fulfil on what would become Love Sux. "It was really fun to start this album and not have a label, because I really was just doing it for fun and working with all of my friends," she reflects.
The fun she's having across the album's 12 tracks is palpable. She leans into pop-punk tropes harder than ever before, with crunchy, high-energy guitar riffs as the modus operandi, alongside improvised ad-libbing and laughter, her personality permeating throughout.
"When I made this album, the songs just felt like we'd really thought about the live show and how much fun these would be in this style live. My headspace was just like: I just want to get into the studio and rock," she explains, underlining an insistence on going back to basics with a bedrock of live drums and amped-up guitars.
"Guitar-driven songs — that's the type of music that I fell in love with at an early age. Guitar was my first instrument," she recalls, before promptly correcting herself: "Actually no, it wasn't. I lied," she laughs. "Piano was!"
"I started playing guitar in high school," she revises, "and I fell in love with bands like Blink-182, the Goo Goo Dolls, the Offspring, Green Day, Matchbox Twenty."
It just so happened that her return to the music of her teenage years coincided with a bonafide pop-punk renaissance. "It's nice to see pop-punk, emo, alternative music being really appreciated and seen right now. It's something that I've always loved," Lavigne says. She describes her excitement in seeing the gap bridged between newer and older artists, with the new generation discovering the "OG bands" that first influenced her in high school.
She mentions the already-infamous When We Were Young festival that she's slated to play this October, alongside the likes of Paramore, My Chemical Romance, the Used, Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional. And in a post-Warped Tour world, that potent nostalgia — mixed with an audience that now has disposable income — means that what was initially supposed to be a single-day event has since added two additional dates due to popular demand.
Love Sux also marks Lavigne's reunion with Blink-182 drummer and longtime friend Travis Barker, with whom her collaborative relationship dates all the way back to the sessions for The Best Damn Thing. "When Travis wanted to sign me to his label [DTA Records], it made sense because we were already writing songs together and recording," she explains. "He had such an important role on the record already, so it was a natural fit."
The Blink-182 drummer has emerged as something of a father figure in the pop-punk renaissance, producing for the likes of rapper-turned-punk Machine Gun Kelly and founding DTA. Lavigne mentions labelmate YUNGBLUD as one of the rising artists she's excited about, alongside fellow Love Sux collaborator and emo-rap provocateur blackbear.
But the real big-ticket guest star on the album is none other than Blink-182 bassist Mark Hoppus. His feature on "All I Wanted" — where he delivers a line that includes "Fuck around and find out" — is a dream come true for Lavigne.
"Blink was one of my favourite bands when I was in high school, and [Hoppus] is such a whiz in the studio. Working with him, I was just watching him write melodies and then write lyrics and then sing them and record himself," she says of their Zoom session, recounting how they each wrote their parts separately and then experimented with putting them together. "He's just really talented and an incredible songwriter, it was such an honour to work with him."
In working with collaborators from across generations, Lavigne is proof that that teen angst is forever.
"I got to work with Willow Smith on her album [2021's lately i feel EVERYTHING] and she was somebody who had come up to me and told me my music was super inspiring to her," says Lavigne. "[Smith] loved my album The Best Damn Thing and would rock out [to it] with her friends in the car."
Lavigne says it's "super flattering" to have the next generation like Smith and Olivia Rodrigo cite her as an inspiration.
"These women are incredible songwriters. I love what they're doing in music and the impact that they're having," she effuses. Rodrigo was undeniably the biggest breakout artist of 2021 with her debut album SOUR, while Smith's "Meet Me at Our Spot" with THE ANXIETY became a TikTok sensation.
When asked if she's imparted any words of wisdom to the emerging singer-songwriters, she laughs.
"I mean, I don't really think they need any advice — they're kind of killing it," adding: "I think they're also very authentic, and that's why they're connecting with such a big audience."
And she should know a thing or two about the makings of a teen idol.
"I was writing songs on the first album from just being fresh out of high school," she says, looking back on her debut LP Let Go ahead of its 20th birthday this June. "Now I have more experiences in life, and reflect on things that I've gone through and write about that."
Still, Love Sux comes across as less intensely autobiographical than the intimate unravellings of albums like Head Above Water, working more to capture moods and conceptualize relatable moments rather than weaving complex narratives. 'Empowerment' is the new record's through-line, with no-nonsense lyrics and insistent rhythms primed to populate a Spotify editorial playlist titled "Walk Like a Badass." While tempos and tempers remain raised for the majority, it finds its peaks and valleys in more power ballad-leaning tracks like "Avalanche" and "Dare You to Love Me."
The album is bookended by "Cannonball" and "Break of a Heartache," the former opening with static feedback and a scorching guitar riff, followed by Lavigne snarling: "I'm about to explode / Motherfuckers, let's go." After its massive whoa-oh singalong chorus, the latter likewise ends on the line: "I don't got time, motherfucker / So I guess it's goodbye," resolving to be done with its anger and move forward with even greater self-assurance.
That's the growth at the crux of it all: even when paying homage to sounds of the past, Lavigne uses these familiar patterns to pave the way into the future with a shiny, patent leather sheen of who she's become in the last two decades, battle scars and all.
"Love Sux is a funny way to laugh at the terrible things that love can do to you," Lavigne says of the self-deprecating titular sentiment, which mirrors the headspace she was in during the early stages of the album taking shape: she was burned out on love. She was over it.
Following high-profile divorces from fellow Canadian rock royals Chad Kroeger and Deryck Whibley, she had certainly been through the wringer enough to warrant trepidation. For the first time, she was determined to focus on herself and not worry about being in a relationship. Of her slew of tattoos, she would embrace the "motherfucking princess" inked on her finger.
But, as irony would have it, she fell in love with partner Mod Sun while working on Love Sux. Now, when she embarks on her first Canadian headlining tour in a decade this May, he'll be her opening act.
Looks like she'll be getting that happy ending after all.
Nearly 20 years later, one of the first lines Avril Lavigne delivers on "Bite Me" — the lead single of her seventh studio album, Love Sux — is: "You should've known better / Better to fuck with someone like me." Allow her to reintroduce herself, no less unabashed.
"I mean, I'm the same person," Lavigne says to Exclaim! over Zoom. "I'm a woman now. I've gone through life experiences and I'm just a little older and wiser. I feel like the same person," she repeats, unintentional emphasis added by the pink streaks in her platinum blonde hair à la 2007's The Best Damn Thing. She wears a black hoodie that wouldn't look out of place with the cargo pants and tank tops she frequented in the early aughts, with dark rings of smoked-out kohl liner still encircling her piercing blue eyes.
Critics condemned her as a teenage girl marketing a fabricated punk aesthetic: an antidote to the bubblegum pop stylings of contemporaries like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Par for the course of being a young woman in the public eye, her authenticity was questioned — but Lavigne knows she's built a career spanning decades on refusing to be anything but herself.
"I think that I was very genuine and I was very authentic, and that's what people connected with the most," she counters, referencing her exemplary early fashion choices. "I was literally wearing clothing right out of my closet, not from photoshoots," including her dad's neck ties and vintage T-shirts emblazoned with the names of the sports teams she played on growing up. She encouraged a generation to not only also raid their fathers' tie collections, but accept her earnest pleas to posers everywhere: "Take off all your preppy clothes."
Fitting in was seemingly never a concern for Lavigne, and that's what was so admirable about her. But it wasn't easy: she dug in tooth and nail against industry pressures to be exactly who she was — and still is — as an artist.
"I fought really hard to write songs on my first album [2002's Let Go]," she explains, "because I was so young, people thought that I maybe wouldn't." The now-37-year-old Lavigne recalls that the producers she was working with at the time were all trying to pitch her stuff that she didn't like. "I really stood my ground and pushed to be a songwriter," she says, "and I'm so glad I did."
As the old adage goes, the rest is history: packaged in the spunky trappings of tight pop-punk hooks, the originality and organic content of her material (and okay, maybe that weirdly elaborate rumour about her being replaced by a clone named Melissa) became her calling card.
"It became the sound that I broke out onto the scene with and people really connected with it," she adds, "and I think that they did because it was truly so authentic to me. I was writing songs about skater boys!" Freshly out of high school, Lavigne really did love skateboarding. "Those were the types of guys I had crushes on," she shrugs, "and that was one of my biggest songs." It's a disarmed relatability that the pop music machine could never replicate.
But she couldn't stay there forever. Recent albums found Lavigne straying from the pop-punk sounds of her earliest releases. "Coming off of the last record [2019's Head Above Water], with it just having been a lot deeper, introspective and emotional," she explains of her later artistic turns, "I wanted to have a lot of fun with this album."
Having fulfilled her latest record contract and being without a manager, she had zero contractual obligations to fulfil on what would become Love Sux. "It was really fun to start this album and not have a label, because I really was just doing it for fun and working with all of my friends," she reflects.
The fun she's having across the album's 12 tracks is palpable. She leans into pop-punk tropes harder than ever before, with crunchy, high-energy guitar riffs as the modus operandi, alongside improvised ad-libbing and laughter, her personality permeating throughout.
"When I made this album, the songs just felt like we'd really thought about the live show and how much fun these would be in this style live. My headspace was just like: I just want to get into the studio and rock," she explains, underlining an insistence on going back to basics with a bedrock of live drums and amped-up guitars.
"Guitar-driven songs — that's the type of music that I fell in love with at an early age. Guitar was my first instrument," she recalls, before promptly correcting herself: "Actually no, it wasn't. I lied," she laughs. "Piano was!"
"I started playing guitar in high school," she revises, "and I fell in love with bands like Blink-182, the Goo Goo Dolls, the Offspring, Green Day, Matchbox Twenty."
It just so happened that her return to the music of her teenage years coincided with a bonafide pop-punk renaissance. "It's nice to see pop-punk, emo, alternative music being really appreciated and seen right now. It's something that I've always loved," Lavigne says. She describes her excitement in seeing the gap bridged between newer and older artists, with the new generation discovering the "OG bands" that first influenced her in high school.
She mentions the already-infamous When We Were Young festival that she's slated to play this October, alongside the likes of Paramore, My Chemical Romance, the Used, Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional. And in a post-Warped Tour world, that potent nostalgia — mixed with an audience that now has disposable income — means that what was initially supposed to be a single-day event has since added two additional dates due to popular demand.
Love Sux also marks Lavigne's reunion with Blink-182 drummer and longtime friend Travis Barker, with whom her collaborative relationship dates all the way back to the sessions for The Best Damn Thing. "When Travis wanted to sign me to his label [DTA Records], it made sense because we were already writing songs together and recording," she explains. "He had such an important role on the record already, so it was a natural fit."
The Blink-182 drummer has emerged as something of a father figure in the pop-punk renaissance, producing for the likes of rapper-turned-punk Machine Gun Kelly and founding DTA. Lavigne mentions labelmate YUNGBLUD as one of the rising artists she's excited about, alongside fellow Love Sux collaborator and emo-rap provocateur blackbear.
But the real big-ticket guest star on the album is none other than Blink-182 bassist Mark Hoppus. His feature on "All I Wanted" — where he delivers a line that includes "Fuck around and find out" — is a dream come true for Lavigne.
"Blink was one of my favourite bands when I was in high school, and [Hoppus] is such a whiz in the studio. Working with him, I was just watching him write melodies and then write lyrics and then sing them and record himself," she says of their Zoom session, recounting how they each wrote their parts separately and then experimented with putting them together. "He's just really talented and an incredible songwriter, it was such an honour to work with him."
In working with collaborators from across generations, Lavigne is proof that that teen angst is forever.
"I got to work with Willow Smith on her album [2021's lately i feel EVERYTHING] and she was somebody who had come up to me and told me my music was super inspiring to her," says Lavigne. "[Smith] loved my album The Best Damn Thing and would rock out [to it] with her friends in the car."
Lavigne says it's "super flattering" to have the next generation like Smith and Olivia Rodrigo cite her as an inspiration.
"These women are incredible songwriters. I love what they're doing in music and the impact that they're having," she effuses. Rodrigo was undeniably the biggest breakout artist of 2021 with her debut album SOUR, while Smith's "Meet Me at Our Spot" with THE ANXIETY became a TikTok sensation.
When asked if she's imparted any words of wisdom to the emerging singer-songwriters, she laughs.
"I mean, I don't really think they need any advice — they're kind of killing it," adding: "I think they're also very authentic, and that's why they're connecting with such a big audience."
And she should know a thing or two about the makings of a teen idol.
"I was writing songs on the first album from just being fresh out of high school," she says, looking back on her debut LP Let Go ahead of its 20th birthday this June. "Now I have more experiences in life, and reflect on things that I've gone through and write about that."
Still, Love Sux comes across as less intensely autobiographical than the intimate unravellings of albums like Head Above Water, working more to capture moods and conceptualize relatable moments rather than weaving complex narratives. 'Empowerment' is the new record's through-line, with no-nonsense lyrics and insistent rhythms primed to populate a Spotify editorial playlist titled "Walk Like a Badass." While tempos and tempers remain raised for the majority, it finds its peaks and valleys in more power ballad-leaning tracks like "Avalanche" and "Dare You to Love Me."
The album is bookended by "Cannonball" and "Break of a Heartache," the former opening with static feedback and a scorching guitar riff, followed by Lavigne snarling: "I'm about to explode / Motherfuckers, let's go." After its massive whoa-oh singalong chorus, the latter likewise ends on the line: "I don't got time, motherfucker / So I guess it's goodbye," resolving to be done with its anger and move forward with even greater self-assurance.
That's the growth at the crux of it all: even when paying homage to sounds of the past, Lavigne uses these familiar patterns to pave the way into the future with a shiny, patent leather sheen of who she's become in the last two decades, battle scars and all.
"Love Sux is a funny way to laugh at the terrible things that love can do to you," Lavigne says of the self-deprecating titular sentiment, which mirrors the headspace she was in during the early stages of the album taking shape: she was burned out on love. She was over it.
Following high-profile divorces from fellow Canadian rock royals Chad Kroeger and Deryck Whibley, she had certainly been through the wringer enough to warrant trepidation. For the first time, she was determined to focus on herself and not worry about being in a relationship. Of her slew of tattoos, she would embrace the "motherfucking princess" inked on her finger.
But, as irony would have it, she fell in love with partner Mod Sun while working on Love Sux. Now, when she embarks on her first Canadian headlining tour in a decade this May, he'll be her opening act.
Looks like she'll be getting that happy ending after all.
