Words By: Rob Lucchesi
What happens when you take a middle school MCR scene queen and a beatnik Billy Idol burnout and lock them in a room together? Well, once you get past the initial “Idol’s pop not punk”, and “Put down the hair dye” talk, you get a sweet, sweet little pop punk baby, their eyes full of edginess, nails already painted, with “Born With Horns” already stuck n’ poke’d across their backs. But before our star-crossed new parents can hold their newborn, YUNGBLUD bursts into the delivery room and curbstomps that baby into oblivion underneath his Dennis the Bounty Hunter-sized Doc Martens.
Now that you’ve got the absolutely lovely image of baby stomping in your head, and hopefully googled Dennis the Bounty Hunter, YUNGBLUD has a new album out! And if we aren’t just tickled pink- sorry, I meant tickled red to tell you all about it! The Nor-Englander’s latest self-titled third album hit the shelves of every gentrified record store on Friday, September 2nd, and has since been met with some opposing reviews. On one hand, The Guardian gave it a good ol’ fashioned thumbs up and a slap in the ass, while on the other, Pitchfork gave it a whopping thumbs down and a kick in the teeth. But let's be honest, if you gave a shit what they thought, you wouldn’t be reading this, so let’s get right into what makes this the worst quote-unquote “rock” album of the month so far.
YUNGBLUD is a god-awful album, the corniest, most poserific grouping of songs on streaming since MGK’s mainstream sellout came out in March. It’s got all your modern pop-rock essentials- three drum loops that get beat to death by the fourth song, your basic D-A-G major chords, maybe even an E minor chord thrown in for the chorus, and of course, an over-generous helping of teenage melodrama. Even with the help of its perfectly crafted industry algorithm, the entire album sounds like it was ripped straight out of the Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge CD jacket, or worse, just copied and pasted straight off of Mania’s Genius page. (Seriously, the emo pop-rock references only get worse from here, read at your own risk.)
The intro track “The Funeral” just sounds like MCR’s “Teenagers” wearing Pete Wentz shaped overalls over thigh-high Converse. At its core, and at its surface, it's just a Gerard Way impression over an unimpressive and unmemorable palm-muted guitar. And it only get’s worse from there- “Tissues”, “Mad”, “Sex Not Violence” are rehashes of the same song that Geffen Records clearly didn’t review before deciding on a release date. “Cruel Kids” and “Sweet Heroine” are just middle school reading level love letters to songs he was too young to have written during the actual pop-punk boom that he’s now too big to rip off. I mean, come on, Cruel Kids? Cruel kids? Dude, even Brendan Urie doesn’t rip songs off like that. “Memories” at least tries to pretend like it’s different from the rest of the album- basic drum loop, airy synths in the background, vapid and meaningless breakup lyrics… wait, no, it’s literally exactly the same as the rest of the tracklist- chewed up, spit out, and still sounds like it was ripped straight off the pages of Leah Kate’s pink fluffy diary full of the nonsense she passes off as lyrics. It does have WILLOW on it though, and as much as I’d love to make a joke about that, she’s kind of the brightspot of the entire thing. (Please don’t misunderstand, it’s not enough to save the song, let alone atone for the album.) But seriously, the only thing this mess of an album’s missing is a Travis Barker feature, but I think he was too busy marrying a Kardashian to drum on another sub-par excuse for rock music.
Nicely put, this album breaks no new ground. But then again, nothing put out in this second-coming of so-called “pop-punk” has broken any kind of ground, so is YUNGBLUD really pulling down the genre or just upholding the Billboard status quo? YUNGBLUD is a city-sized dumpster fire of a third attempt, but at the end of the day, the dude’s got something figured out, because every Hellfire Club shirt wearing, country club attending, e-person wannabe is listening to this album right now, but that doesn’t mean you should too. Please, just save yourselves the 33 minutes and listen to something else.
Click here for some songs we would MUCH rather be listening to.
Rob Lucchesi
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