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Maroon 5’s Adam Levine laments lack of rivals in 2021

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 4 March 2021

There are no more bands. So says Adam Levine, frontman of the band Maroon 5. His is the last one, though, you see. Apart from all the other bands, of course. But apart from them, there are no more bands.

This all came up when Levine was getting nostalgic for the early 2000s in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. “I’ve been playing [my daughter] a lot of Avril Lavigne records”, he said. “Like, dude, ‘I’m With You’ is like – it’s, yeah, that gives you tears”.

“It’s crazy, because you don’t remember it in the same way”, he went on, “because you took it for granted, because it was like, when you were growing up, and it was just part of what you had on the radio. But there’s some really great songs that I didn’t understand how good they were back then”.

With his eyes now all misted up, he continues: “It’s funny, when the first Maroon 5 album came out there were still other bands. I feel like there aren’t any bands anymore, you know? That’s the thing that makes me kind of sad, is that there were just bands. There’s no bands anymore, and I feel like they’re a dying breed”.

Before you get all shirty about that statement, he does then clarify: “I mean, there still are plenty of bands, and maybe they’re [just] not in the limelight quite as much, or in the pop limelight, but I wish there could be more of those around”.

He’s right that the early 2000s was a particularly fertile time for more conventional bands looking for US chart success. Green Day, Fall Out Boy, All-American Rejects, Simple Plan, The Calling, Blink 182, Good Charlotte, Sum 41, New Found Glory, The Killers, Nickelback, Incubus, Staind, Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance and more all had chart success in the early part of the decade.

And as Maroon 5 first rose to fame with their debut album, ‘Songs About Jane’, in 2004, bands were definitely still in fashion.

Many of those bands are still around, of course. And other band-like bands have become similarly popular since then – The 1975 and Bastille to name just two. But if you look at this week’s Billboard Hot 100, it’s definitely light on bands. So maybe Levine has a point. But I think the thing we should all be lamenting is that Adam Levine is talking about this because his band are very much still here.

Yeah, why is Adam Levine talking right now? Because Adam Levine has new music to promote. New Maroon 5 music. Oh god. New single ‘Beautiful Mistakes’ features Megan Thee Stallion, but that’s not enough to save it. It’s still a Maroon 5 song. Why, 2021? Why? Haven’t we suffered enough?