Good Charlotte have announced details of their forthcoming eighth album, Motel Du Cap. And the Los Angeles band launched their next era last night, June 25, by performing the album's first single Rejects on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
A press statement about the album, the group's first since 2018's Generation Rx, reveals that the initial spark for Motel Du Cap was ignited when Joel and Benji Madden's band played a private gig at the Hotel du Cap in France for a friend's wedding, in 2023.
"It was this wild, once-in-a-lifetime vibe," Joel Madden recalls. "We were just there to celebrate, no pressure, and it reminded us why we started this - pure, unfiltered connection."
Talking to Rolling Stone, Madden explains, "hen we made the first record in ‘99, we didn’t know any better than to not give a fuck. We didn’t know you were supposed to give a fuck. We thought it was the greatest thing ever to make a record and to say whatever the fuck we wanted to say. Then you get into the game of the music business and get a little spun around.
"We came full-circle back to where we’re all in really good places in our lives where we don’t give a fuck, in a great way. We certainly care about people and our fans. But our families are really the center of our lives. So Good Charlotte is something that we get to be totally free in. We don’t necessarily need it to perform. We actually just need it to be itself."
"Now, when we write we only set out to do one thing: express ourselves," adds his twin brother Benji. "We don’t premeditate any songs. We write a stream of consciousness. It’s something we kind of learned over the years as we thought back to when we made our first couple of records. We came all the way around to what was the best thing for us, which is just to let our feelings out and not try to control it too much."
Watch the band perform Rejects on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Motel Du Cap will be released on August 8 via Atlantic Records.
