Whether it’s acting, touring extensively, or writing crispy, chirpy riffage, there’s nothing All Time Low can’t do. Now, they’ve added another feature to their New Era flat cap thanks to guitarist Jack Barakat opening up a new bar.
It won’t just be any old bar either. Launching in L.A. later this month in line with Barakat’s birthday, The Riff, as it’s been christened, takes inspiration from similar venues you can find throughout the UK, but apparently not in the US – a bar inspired by late’90s and early 2000s punk, garage, and alt rock. As Barakat explains to Alt Press, he was also inspired by his local cities lack of options.
“There are so many bars in Baltimore that are just, you know, you just go in and drink. Some of them have like open mics and some of them are just sports bars. There wasn’t anything like a theme bar, where people wanted to hear good rock music and early-2000s emo/pop punk go.
“We would tour England, and they had tons of places like this. It’s so common over there to see that, and I was like, “Why isn’t that over here in the U.S.?” There are just as many fans of this style of music in this genre of music in the States.”
Barakat has dipped his feet in the nightclub game before. In 2014 he launched The Rockwell. Prior to that, he and ATL vocalist Alex Gaskarth had a hand in helping Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz when he launched Angels & Kings in L.A.
