In April 2023, Good Charlotte played their first show in five years in one of the most improbable places: the vast, luxe halls of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in the South of France. Wearing Doc Martens and black suits with tattoos peaking out, Joel and Benji Madden, bassist Paul Thomas, and guitarist Billy Martin brought their pop-punk attitude to the swanky space and delivered high-energy versions of their 2000s hits for Sofia Richie’s wedding afterparty. Yes, that Sofia Richie, the model and internet personality, who is also Joel’s sister-in-law.
“Sofia and Elliot [Grainge] asked us to play their wedding,” Joel Madden says on a Zoom call. “They grew up on our band, so it was a really special moment for us to be able to bring something we love that they love.”
While videos of Richie dancing barefoot and singing along to “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous” went viral, the occasion marked a pivotal moment for Good Charlotte. In the South of France, a long way from Los Angeles and their Maryland roots, brothers Joel and Benji looked around and saw just how many of their dreams have come true. “We wanted to grow up and have happy families, and there we were, having this unforgettable night with our extended family of 19 years,” Benji Madden recalls.
Good Charlotte knew they had tapped into something they hadn’t in years; something worth exploring for the first time since 2018. “We had such a great night, and we were all sitting around, and we were like, ‘Should we do an album?’ The whole band was like, ‘Fuck yeah, yes, let’s do an album,’” Joel says.
Now, Good Charlotte are gearing up to release Motel Du Cap, the band’s eighth LP and first full-length project in seven years. The album’s lead single, “Rejects,” is out today, marking the official start of the band’s new era. Rolling Stone caught up with the Madden brothers to talk about Motel Du Cap, the possibility of touring the album, and what it’s like to return to Good Charlotte.
Why did you choose to commemorate that memory of the wedding at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Rock with the album title, Motel Du Cap?
Benji: We were like, “When would Hotel Du Cap ever have Good Charlotte play at Eden Roc?’
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Joel: Yeah, that juxtaposition of us at this fancy hotel. We couldn’t name the album after the hotel, but we could make it our own thing.
Benji: Motel Du Cap feels more appropriate. There’s always a little colored sarcasm in our music, there’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but then there is always some really deep meaningful subject matter on our records, too. It felt very appropriate to commemorate such a meaningful, beautiful night. It’s one of my best memories.
The album’s first single, “Rejects,” reminds me a bit of your early track “Little Things,” energetically and sonically. Did you guys go in with that mentality?
Joel: You’re feeling that exactly right. It’s really full-circle because when 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.
Benji: Now, when we write we only set out to do one thing: express ourselves. 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. You don’t need to write 50 songs for a record; you need to write 12. Whatever came out in that moment is the whole portrait. We made this record completely unconsciously. We didn’t meditate, we made it. We just said, “We need to get some things out,” and we hit record.
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What made you guys choose “Rejects” as the lead single?
Joel: I don’t even think “Rejects” is necessarily the most obvious single type song, but it’s the one we feel like people should hear first. We think it’s a really great start and a representation of the record and the music.
Benji: This record is the kickoff of Act Two and everything that came before that was a journey of a lifetime.
Lyrically, “Rejects” is super honest, touching on some dark thoughts. What went into writing lines like that hook “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t born at all”?
Joel: We all feel that way sometimes. It’s OK to feel that way. When I say, “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t born at all,” I don’t mean it where I want to be gone. I am not suicidal and, thank God, I’m not depressed. But I’ve had times in my life where I was, and I had to figure that out, and it was a lot of work to figure out my own mental health and self-esteem. I’m still working on all of it all of the time. We’re all a work in progress.
Sometimes you have moments in life where it’s really fucking hard. It has nothing to do with your family or your success or your failure or whatever. But it’s a moment of aloneness, and you question stuff, and even have to give yourself the room to feel OK with those moments. That line, that just came out of me. I feel like everyone can relate to it, no matter who they are. They have those moments where they have to take a knee or let out a deep sigh or whatever, and then just keep getting on with it.
Benji: “Rejects” is very meaningful. It flips back and forth between you and your inner child. To me, the chorus is the inner child screaming back at you because we leave our inner children behind. When we can find our power in life is when we can get reintegrated with that kid. Joel, you fully just never wrote the lyrics down.
Joel: Yeah, I don’t write lyrics down.
Benji: It’s just boom, boom, boom.
How does it feel to be creating new music more than 20 years into your career as a band?
Benji: It feels really good. We learned to do things in our own time and just follow the feeling, and it just feels right. We both felt like we had an album in us, and then we started to feel like “We need to get this out.” The beautiful thing about where we’re at now is it really is about the process. It’s a nice thing when you are just able to create from this very inspired and content place. It allows us to share it with people in a very “no expectations” way and let people have their own experience with it. Joel, have you ever been happier with an album process?
Joel: This band is so unique to itself and we are constantly discovering what it means to be in Good Charlotte, especially in 2025. It’s funny, because in some ways I could say, “Yeah, it’s the best I’ve ever felt.” In other ways, it doesn’t feel like the world is on my shoulders. We set out to make a great record, and we love it, and it’s also filled us up in a way that we want to go on tour, which is a feeling we haven’t had in a long time. This is a record we can take around the world.
Are there plans to tour the album?
Joel: We are going to do a world tour in ‘26, and I don’t know if that means it’s 20 shows or 40 shows or 60 shows, but whatever it is, it’s a number that we feel every show has to feel unique and special, just like the album does. We want each moment to feel unique. The wedding show we played felt unique. It felt special, it felt meaningful. We all caught that and said, “This is how we want to feel every time we go onstage.” It’s interesting. People haven’t actually gotten a lot of opportunities to see us live. We just haven’t toured in a meaningful way in probably 10 years or so. There’s so many people that will be seeing us for the first time, and we want to make it special and exciting that they finally get to see us. It’s going to be a really fun show with lots of cool little surprises and things that make people happy. Hopefully, it just feels like a big fucking wedding party every night.
Some fans online have been asking for an “Eras” throwback tour of some kind. Do you plan to shape the tour like that?
Joel: We are going to hit every era, but we’re trying to figure out how long a show should be. Two hours is too long but we’re not sure if an hour-and-a-half will work. When we tried to fit everything into an hour and ten minutes in our headlining set at Welcome to Rockville, we still had to cut five songs that people wanted to hear. It’s crazy. Some shows might just have to be a little longer depending on where and what, but it’s going to be a lot of fun to hit all the eras of GC live, and then the new stuff is going to be fun live, too.
You brought out Wheatus during Welcome to Rockville, and even joined Luke Combs during his Stagecoach set. How did those appearances come about? Do you hope to bring more guests out at shows?
Joel: We’re lucky because Good Charlotte works with lots of genres. We’re in this weird space where we could go heavier, we could go poppier, we can even go country with Luke [Combs]. Those moments mean so much to us. “Teenage Dirtbag” is one of my favorite songs, and to have Brendan [Bernard Brown] come out and do it felt like giving him his flowers for writing one of the greatest songs. It’s also always a goal of mine to have a big sing-along. I don’t care if it’s our songs or someone else’s songs. I just want it to feel like a throwback night where you’re with your friends and you’re living right now and remembering back when.
Benji: It’s just really fun, and we’ve made all these amazing friends over the years, and it’s so cool to share the stage with people. If we go anywhere, we’re bringing someone fun with us, or we’re bringing some kind of crazy production. It’s fun to surprise people.
You played When We Were Young a couple of years back. Would you be open to joining Warped Tour this year or next year in D.C.?
Joel: I don’t know why Warped Tour D.C. didn’t work out this year. We love Warped Tour, but again, if we’re going to do 20 shows over a year, every single show has to be something that people are going to get their money’s worth, and they’re going to see Good Charlotte and hear our full set. I’d still pop up and do one. We’ll see.
Benji: Logistically, this one couldn’t work, but I have no doubt we’ll be back at a Warped Tour sometime.
What friends did you call up for collaborations on Motel du Cap?
Joel: One of my favorite artists is this new guy from Maryland, he’s got a real place in our hearts. His name’s Luke Borchelt and he’s a country singer not far from where we’re from in Maryland. We did a song with him that I’m really excited about. I’m such a fan of his album. He just got off the road with Shaboozey, who’s also from the DMV area. It’s so cool to see people from home making these big impactful musical moments. We also have a feature from Wiz Khalifa. It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been friends a long time, and we’ve been talking about doing something, and we finally got to.
Benji: I love the Wiz song. It’ll be one of the more memorable songs in our catalog when this record comes out. It’s a really cool song.
Joel: We wrote a song with Matt Koma from Winnetka Bowling League, who’s one of our best friends and plays with us live. Who else did we write with Benj?
Benji: Jordan Fish. We also wrote with a dear friend of ours that I think would surprise people too: Charlie Puth. Charlie produced it, and I think there’s some sneaky Charlie vocals in there in the mix. It’s not a feature but you’ll hear it.
Joel: He snuck them in there for sure.
Who else produced the album?
Benji: We got to do a majority of the record with Jordan Fish. When Jordan joined Bring Me the Horizon, I immediately was like, “Whatever they did there, that’s really special.” Now that Jordan left the band and he’s producing full time, I knew I wanted to make music with him.
We made most of the record with Jordan and Zakk Cevini and me and Joel together. It allowed for us to have a place to be really vulnerable and just try and sing about things that you don’t know if this is going to turn into a song. If you’re in a room with a bunch of people that are thinking about hit songs, it ain’t going to make it past the first verse. To have a space where no one gives a fuck, it’s not about anything other than let’s just do something special, that’s when things can happen.
Good Charlotte’s last album was 2018’s Generation X. The band took a similar hiatus between albums back in the early 2010s. What’s the biggest advantage of allowing this time between releases?
Benji: It’s like we lived a lifetime before we made our first record, from when we were born to all our experiences in early childhood and adolescence. We’ve played out those insecurities, those great moments, and we did it as young people in front of the world. We took our lives back. We nurtured our own growth and spent valuable time with our families and loved ones. It’s like we’ve been living and filling the gas tank up with more experience, more lessons, more self-realizations, more explorations in order to be better and be able to give back to fans now.
Joel: It’s a little less-is-more type of thing, where I actually really get to move through the world now at a pace I could sustain and interact with people and have memories and meet people. It’s a nice little pace. I actually prefer to live that way. Even going and doing a big festival like Welcome to Rockville was still at a pace where we could interact with everyone and make a memory versus running in and doing a million things.
With artist-management company, MDDN, you’ve become mentors in the pop-punk and rock scene. How did that role inform this album?
Joel: At MDDN, we work with these amazing bands, and we get to interact with and participate in their lives in ways that are really fun for us. It’s more meaningful to me to watch them shine and see them accomplishing all their achievements. As artists, they’re just making really great music and they’re incredible to watch. It’s so fulfilling.
Benji: It’s also very healing and it’s such a blessing. We don’t take it for granted. We really cherish and appreciate that we get to tell them things that we wish people would’ve told us.
Joel: They teach us things that no one told us, too. There is a real true collaboration of age and perspective and experience.
What was the scariest part of returning to Good Charlotte?
Joel: The only thing we’re always ever worried about is how much time any of it will take away from our families. Thank God, we have such supportive wives and kids. It’s a really nice situation where everybody’s on board with just figuring it out together. What we don’t want to do is make it at the cost of them. The only thing we’ve all ever talked about is to have successful family lives. We’re trying our hardest, and everything we do is going to be measured by that.
What’s interesting about Good Charlotte is we are a part of this generation of people figuring out how to live life and not take the old information we were fed as kids, and try to figure out how to be dads, how to be husbands, how to have families. It is actually a big broad span of a couple generations of people who come from that high divorce-rate generation, and we can all relate to it. We actually want to get our personal lives right and hopefully have success in the world, but not at any costs.
Benji: Genuinely, the only thing that matters to us is successful family lives, and the rest will just be additive.
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Joel: We’re at a nice place where we are not really that worried about anything other than the people that want to enjoy the album will enjoy it. Whoever hears it will hear it, and we’ll do as many shows as we can, and we’ll be happy with it. Whatever we show up for, we’re going to give it everything we have.
Benji: We’re making not-broken homes. We started going to therapy and we started working on our self-esteem because when we were young, we had low self-esteem. We really needed to be validated. But once we fixed that, the need for validation just went and doesn’t motivate us anymore. For us, we’re motivated by experiences, by doing things that feel special, and by sharing these with the people we love.
