+44 released When Your Heart Stops Beating in the UK on November 13, 2006, through Interscope. Their debut brought Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker back together after blink-182’s 2005 breakup, with guitarists Shane Gallagher and Craig Fairbaugh completing the band. The familiar rhythm section was there, but the record grew out of experiments that initially needed neither a loud guitar amplifier nor a full drum kit.
The title track was a late arrival. Hoppus told Alternative Press in 2006 that “When Your Heart Stops Beating” was the last song they finished, with contributions from everyone. “This is something we built together,” he said. Before it became the album’s title, the band had considered naming the record after “Little Death,” a song they had developed across home and studio sessions.
Hoppus explained the early working method in an August 2006 interview with AbsolutePunk, preserved at chorus.fm. Recording in Barker’s basement and Hoppus’s dining room meant using keyboards and electronic drums. A beat from Barker could become the starting point for a guitar part and then a vocal, changing the way Hoppus approached writing. Practical limits had opened up a different process.
Buying their own studio gave them room to turn up. Acoustic drums, distorted guitars and louder vocals changed the arrangements, though electronic parts remained. The lineup changed alongside the music. Early collaborator Carol Heller left as Hoppus took on more singing and she prepared to start a family. Her voice remained on the finished album, including the exchange with Hoppus on “Make You Smile.” That duet preserved a part of the project’s early identity within the expanded band.
Hoppus and Barker produced the album, with Jerry Finn credited as co-producer. Finn joined after much of the writing and recording was complete, then helped shape the remaining work and contributed ideas to songs. It renewed a working relationship from blink-182, while Hoppus and Barker had already established the material’s direction themselves.
The arrangements kept traces of those different beginnings. In the Alternative Press track-by-track, Hoppus pointed to “Baby Come On” as a useful example of the group’s mixture of rock guitars, drums and electronics. Barker’s work in hip-hop informed another choice: the handclaps in “155.” And the brief instrumental “Interlude,” developed during the basement sessions, became a pause between the upbeat “Cliffdiving” and the darker “Weatherman.” The sequencing made room for the early experiments alongside the fuller rock songs.
The breakup was also part of what listeners heard. Discussing “No, It Isn't” with MTV News, in comments reported by NME, Barker identified the song as a response to blink-182’s collapse and the frustration of keeping quiet about it. That gave the record a specific personal conflict without making every track an account of the split. “Make You Smile,” with its shared vocals and electronic piano, offered a different kind of conversation.
The album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 10, selling approximately 66,000 copies in its first U.S. week. In February 2009, Hoppus and Barker reunited with blink-182. Hoppus subsequently told Alternative Press that +44 was on hiatus, leaving the door open to returning while making clear that their attention was going into blink-182.
