Since rising as a hyperactive, scaffolding-scaling rapper within the early 2010s, MGK — previously Machine Gun Kelly, born Colson Baker — has solid his personal path by means of the pop-cultural consciousness. He’s feuded with Eminem; he’s engaged in egregious red-carpet PDA along with his onetime flame Megan Fox; he’s acted in motion pictures and TV, along with his full-body channeling of Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee being a spotlight of the laborious rockers’ 2019 biopic The Filth. And, oh sure, he’s launched data.
In 2020, MGK absolutely pivoted from hip-hop to pop-punk with Tickets to My Downfall, a group of punchy, hooky cuts that included the spittle-flecked Halsey duet “Overlook Me Too” and the trap-tinged blackbear collab “My Ex’s Greatest Buddy.” He continued enjoying with style within the ensuing years, even calling his model of bummed-out emo-rap “sadboy” on a 2024 joint EP with fellow Ohioan Trippie Redd.
Mgk has at all times had a quintessentially — if oddly — American public-facing persona, which was solely highlighted by how he managed to get Bob Dylan to offer a voiceover for the album’s trailer. (Dylan known as MGK’s ad engagement work, “ music that celebrates the sweetness discovered within the in-between areas.”) On his seventh album, he musically and thematically updates the idea of “heartland rock,” the storytelling-heavy, road-trip-ready pressure of guitar music made by the likes of John Cougar Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen.
Opening observe “Outlaw Overture” proclaims itself with a heat-lightning blast of synths that results in a pugilistic protection of his rebellious nature, then shape-shifts into starlit balladry that additional reveals MGK’s actually American dream: “Take me someplace low-cost/The place the livin’ is simple/Out of all their attain/Set my spirit free,” he wails, extending the final “e” sound to the size of an interstate. “Indigo” exhibits the best way hip-hop has grow to be a part of American pop music’s material, his knotty rhymes detailing the tribulations he’s endured over the previous few years; “Candy Coraline” makes use of Strokes-inspired guitar choppiness for example the unsettling feeling of being treated like an avatar of celebrity in real life.
MGK’s let-it-all-hang-out persona is the actual star of the present, and his lyrics — which can little doubt be pored over by individuals in search of more details on his love life — are sometimes razor-sharp: “Solely lights on my horizon are ones that pull me over,” he muses on the camaraderie-dappled “miss sunshine.” That high quality makes “Cliché” looks like an in-joke that ought to have stayed within the studio, combining well-worn lyrical tropes (“Child, I’m a rolling stone,” “It is best to run away with me/Even should you’re higher off alone”) with music that splits the distinction between ‘00s grownup modern and fashionable pop-country. But it surely additionally exhibits how MGK, who at 35 has already lived a minimum of two lifetimes of stardom, is, for higher or worse, at all times in perpetual movement.
From Rolling Stone US.