Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, Blink-182's fourth studio album, hit shelves on June 12, 2001, through MCA Records. The title, a crude pun on male masturbation, perfectly captures the band's juvenile humor, but the music shows a group starting to stretch beyond their goofy persona. Recorded between December 2000 and March 2001 at Signature Sound in San Diego and Larrabee West and Cello Studios in Hollywood, the album was produced by Jerry Finn, who had worked with the band on their previous two records. At the time, the trio consisted of Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus, and Travis Barker, and they were coming off the massive success of Enema of the State. Creative burnout and internal tension over the band's direction simmered during the sessions, yet the album still emerged as a polished, hook-filled pop-punk juggernaut.

The standard edition packs thirteen tracks, running just under 40 minutes. Singles "The Rock Show" and "First Date" were written deliberately as throwaway songs after a record executive asked for tracks that could be packaged as singles, but both became modern rock radio staples. "Stay Together for the Kids," the third single, tackles Hoppus's parents' divorce with a surprisingly earnest tone, hinting at the more mature songwriting to come on later albums. The original CD release came in three collectible versions, Red, Yellow, and Green, each with two exclusive bonus tracks. A 25th Anniversary Edition in 2026 gathered all six vault tracks onto one disc: "Time to Break Up," "Mother's Day," "What Went Wrong?," "Fuck a Dog," "Don't Tell Me It's Over," and "When You Fucked Grandpa."

Commercially, the album was a landmark. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling over 350,000 copies in its first week, making it the first punk rock album to top the chart in the United States. It earned double platinum certification from the RIAA by May 2002 and has sold over 14 million copies globally. To support the record, Blink-182 co-headlined the Pop Disaster Tour with Green Day, a massive arena trek that cemented both bands' status as arena-filling acts. Critics at the time were split, some praised the expanded emotional range, others found the juvenile lyrics limiting, but the album's influence on the early-2000s pop-punk explosion is undeniable. [edit]