The 20-year-old TikTok personality turned punk rocker’s debut album won’t stop announcing how punk it is.
Before Travis Barker drummed behind a fist-pumping Willow Smith, before he and Machine Gun Kelly released an album of catchy, thrashing rock songs, before Rolling Stone crowned him “Gen-Z’s Pop Punk Whisperer,” he became convinced Jaden Hossler was the future. One of Barker’s teenage children told him about Hossler, a TikTok star who came to fame as part of the fratty content collective Sway House; many of his videos feature him shirtless and lip-syncing, scowling on a skateboard with a cigarette or dancing in a pool. In 2020, Hossler self-released a single, “Comatose,” a blown-out, guitar-heavy lament about not caring enough to miss his ex. Barker called him the next day, and soon signed Hossler as the first artist on his DTA label. Tell Me About Tomorrow is Hossler’s debut as Jxdn, but it’s Barker who looms over every track. Despite Hossler’s outsized online persona, the record tells us nothing about who he is, only who he wants to emulate.
The result is an album that won’t stop announcing how punk it is. There are incessant power chords and pounding drums, howls and moans and shouted choruses. If Hossler sounds like he’s discovering the genre for the first time, it’s because he is. He’s open about only starting to listen to punk two years ago, after wearing a Descendents T-shirt in a music video; now, he proudly tells interviewers they’re his favorite band. Hossler has a sweet, melodic voice that he strains into a grunt or a rasp, or contorts into a whine in the grand tradition of 2000s-era pop-punk bands like Boys Like Girls or All Time Low or Mayday Parade. Most of the time, though, he’s just doing his best Machine Gun Kelly impression.
The difference is that Machine Gun Kelly often sounds like he’s in on the joke, basking in his own schtick or writing with scene-setting specificity. Hossler treats “rock star” as a stand-in for identity or taste, repeating the phrase over and over like he’s trying to convince himself. He’s “fucked up like a rock star”; he begs a lover to “fuck me like a rock star”; he claims a girl called him a rock star “so I gotta rock it.” “I’m still a fucking rock star!” he wails on “Angels & Demons Pt. 2,” “and I can still dance when I want to!” “Haha, siiiick,” he sneers at the end of “So What!,” verbalizing the self-serious satisfaction that permeates the record.
Hossler’s two goals with the album were “helping mental health awareness” and “making real, authentic music,” he said last December, but clunky writing makes legitimate struggles sound hokey and synthetic. “I think I’m addicted to the feeling of depression,” he yowls on “No Vanity.” “It’s been cloudy with a chance of anxiety,” he trills on “Better Off Dead,” a twinkly track co-written with the mopey pop singer Lauv. For all of Barker’s obvious fingerprints, Tell Me About Tomorrow’s credits also include a curated lineup of sadbois. The garishly too-online singer blackbear helped produce; SoundCloud-adjacent rapper Iann Dior stops by for a sludgy verse; MGK himself screams along over thwacking drums on “Wanna Be.” The soundscape blurs together until every sincere-seeming confession—“I wanna be alright,” “Some days I wish I could disappear,” “I wish I didn’t waste so much time bein’ anxious”—gets sanitized and sanded down.
Hossler’s music sounds more like a collision of trend and opportunity than anything birthed out of his skillset. It’s hard not to imagine how drastically different this album would be if he’d become famous five years ago, or five years in the future, when the current resurgence in Hot Topic stylings will have inevitably faded. Until then, there will likely be a glut of albums that sound like this, some produced by Barker and some glibly mimicking him: pop-punk fueled by all the same angst, misogyny, and interpersonal toxicity as the mid-aughts, just with more influencer clout and fewer side parts.
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