GOOD CHARLOTTE, EVEN BETTER TIMES

Joel and Benji Madden's pop-punk band returned after years to play at friends' wedding, and kept the comeback going to release a new album

- MIKAEL WOOD

As rock-band relaunches go, Good Charlotte's was conspicuously ritzy.

In April 2023, the pop-punk group known for snotty if smiley Y2K-era hits like “The Anthem” and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” — “I'd like to see them spend a week / Livin’ life out on the street,” goes a lyric in the latter—played its first gig in four years not at a club or a festival but as the musical entertainment at a wedding at Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc in the sun-kissed south of France. The bride and groom: Sofia Richie, the model and influencer whose father is Lionel Richie, and Elliot Grainge, the record executive son of Universal Music Group Chairman Lucian Grainge.

“Sofia Richie has raised the bar for celebrity weddings,” People magazine proclaimed of the ceremony, which Vogue described as the year's “royal wedding” and which led Elle to anoint Richie's “quiet luxury wedding hair” as the “beauty moment that dominated 2023.”

Reflecting on her nuptials, Richie — whose older sister Nicole has been married to Good Charlotte frontman Joel Madden since 2010 — downplays the glitz and glamour. “Our wedding didn’t look small, but it was really about family,” she tells The Times. With that in mind, Good Charlotte was a “no-brainer,” she says. “I knew they were gonna play all the vibes, and the room just erupted. Every single person was singing every single word. It was electric.”

Reckons Madden, who formed Good Charlotte with his twin brother Benji when the two were high school kids in suburban Maryland: “Easily one of the top 10 greatest nights of my life.”