NINE

Mark told NME

It’s very different to California. It’s a lot more aggressive. It’s darker in theme and tone. If you like California to Enema Of The State then this album is more like the untitled record where we are trying to experiment more: trying to experiment more, trying different sounds, and trying to expand upon what people think Blink 182 is.

We’ll keep the core of Blink 182 but we’ll get a little more experimental. Kind of like what we did on the untitled record, which we’re all really proud of. It still sounded like Blink and had that Blink feeling, but it was different and a little more thought out.

Travis told billboard

I feel like [2016’s] California was similar to [1999’s] Enema of the State and [2001’s] Take Off Your Pants and Jacket: reestablishing the band, giving fans what they really want and expect from Blink. Now that we got that out of our system naturally, we’re not writing like that this time. It’s more experimental. It’s not like you’re listening and thinking, “Oh I’ve heard that before, oh I can compare this to this other song.” With this album, we’re re-establishing new songs, new rhythms, new ideas.

Where I look back at California, you could compare “Cynical” to other fast songs we’ve done. I could put “She’s Out of Her Mind” down as a brother-sister record to “Rock Show” or “First Date.” The songs on the new album don’t have any brothers or sisters. They don’t sound like anything we’ve done before. Songs on self-titled like “Feeling This” and “I Miss You,” I really feel like those didn’t sound like anything Blink had touched on before. I just know we’re doing that again. That’s exciting to me.

As Mark explains here he counts Buddha from 1994 as an album, although some refer to it as a demo.

NINE. this is our ninth album, as decided by me and travis. some count buddha, some not. some count the mark tom and travis show. some count greatest hits. some count dogs eating dogs. i’m counting buddha, cheshire cat, dude ranch, enema of the state, toypaj, untitled, neighborhoods, califronia, and now NINE. nine is also the number of universal love. and the number of uranus. remember to like and smash that subscribe button, or whatever it is the kids say now.

Although the official reason to why it’s called NINE is the one mentioned above, the band has gone to great extent to find other reasons as to why the album is titled that way. They told ALT 1057

[Mark:] Number 9 is the number of Uranus
[Matt:] There are a few things I noticed about nine: September is the ninth month of the year, there are nine figures when you spell out ‘blink-182’ with the dash […]
[Mark:] That’s what I’m going with from now on
[Matt:] Nine deadly sins […]

Mark told ALT 1057:

We worked with John Feldmann before. We started writing the album in his studio… kind of caught our legs there. Went out of that studio, worked with a bunch of producers that we know… and some other people that we didn’t know in and around LA, and put together a group of songs that we really love

Hoppus revealed in an interview

NINE was something that Travis and I had talked about, and we’d come up with some joke titles and some other kind of things. We’d originally not wanted to call it anything, and were maybe thinking about just not titling it at all – but we already did that once, so we didn’t know if we should call it ‘Extra Untitled’ or what. So we’re like ‘let’s just call this what number album this is’, and depending on which you think is our first album and which you include, this is nine.

Mark Hoppus told GoRadioMN

I think we recorded about 40 to 50 songs to narrow down to 15.