Take me to your best friend’s house x your other best friend’s house x your other other best friend’s house
[Video]
[5.33]
[4]
Kylo Nocom: I suppose that a song from an artist I find reprehensible on the basis of his aesthetic, an artist I find reprehensible on the basis of his frat boy antics, and the Fortnite DJ could sound way worse. The result of their hard work is a Simple Plan tune with record scratches, the “Break the Rules” opening riff, and a distraught K.Flay drop, none of which are objectionable features.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: We don’t extend Generation Z nearly enough sympathy for the burdens that await them in their future. In 15 years, like generations of Olds before them, they’ll have to explain to a skeptical, tastefully-playlisted, Warped Tour-negative audience why their embarrassing tweenage bro-ey faves, since turned thirtysomething guilty pleasures, were Good Actually. Except they’ll have to do it for a guy with a marshmallow encasing his skull.
[5]
Andy Hutchins: The video for “Tongue Tied” posits a dystopia in which Yungblud being captured and silenced would be a terrible thing that would make international headlines. The song itself seems to believe that Marshmello could somehow make a believable protest anthem. Self-delusion is a hell of a drug.
[3]
Will Rivitz: Towards a unified theory of pop-punk: The most striking moment of the YUNGBLUD concert I attended two months ago, despite the Brit’s impressive on-stage charisma and energy, occurred when the curators of the between-set playlist threw on “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” a few minutes before the artist stepped on stage. I’m in my mid-20s, so the song’s 2005 release date falls right in my misanthropic-preteen wheelhouse; I was initially stunned to hear the concert’s mostly mid-teenaged audience, a group the vast majority of whom would have been in diapers upon the song’s release, shout along in unison to every word. That a crowd of a markedly different generation would undergo the same shade of cathartic release to the same piece of art that hit me the same way fifteen years ago, I would argue, is explained two ways. First: Brendon Urie’s continued relevance leads the kids of today to resonate with his earlier work in a way they likely wouldn’t with, say, Flyleaf or Three Days Grace; I experienced the same phenomenon when falling in love with Linkin Park’s 2000 Hybrid Theory via 2010’s A Thousand Suns. Second, and more importantly: pop-punk may wear different clothes through the decades, but its core tenets stay the same. In a phrase, it is defined by unity through shared alienation; whether that unity is couched in the anger of nu-metal, the overblown tragedy of glammed-up emo, the coy snark of Lorde-led alt-pop, or the emotive hollowness of emo-rap, it’s the same succor to its audience of disaffected tweens and teens nonetheless. Call YUNGBLUD’s chorus of “If you feel like,?that?you’re tongue-tied / Then we’re?tongue-tied together” hamfisted, if you will, but it gets at the same fundamental truth in “You’ve got to make a choice if the music drowns you out / And raise your voice every single time they try and shut your mouth” that My Chemical Romance expressed a decade prior: you are not the only one who feels like this. (That the “Tongue Tied” video is effectively a note-for-note rehash of Danger Days-era MCR feels cosmically appropriate.) The song itself is, on its own, very good: Marshmello crunches guitars and trap hi-hats into a ruthlessly efficient gut punch in the same straightforwardly invigorating vein of a Brad Delson power chord or a Lil Peep 808 hit. Blackbear preaches dramatic post-betrayal nihilism that, yes, is kind of gross at times, but of the same school of grossness that resonated with me and almost everyone like me when we were really just going through it (and that we’ve blessedly mostly grown out of since, but no matter). Most importantly, YUNGBLUD twists that nihilism and brokenness into a magnetic force, reminding the listener that it’s normal to feel helpless, that he feels helpless too, and that we’re all as one group of people who have listened to this song a shameful number of times since its release joined and empowered by our shared helplessness, that if this joining and empowering dissipates that helplessness even a little, it will have been worth it. The kids are not all right; the kids have never been all right; the kids join together under the aegis of their not-all-rightness and find solace in unity; the kids age out into adults and settle into themselves; the new kids take up their mantle. We’re here for each other.
[9]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Yungblud is an irritant, but a compelling one– his verse melodies are hooky almost to a fault, and his boyband!Lil Peep stylings work infuriatingly well. He’s the first vocalist that’s worked well with Marshmello, so flimsy in his performance that his producer’s ubercleanness is an asset not a drag. Blackbear still sucks, though– he’s beamed in from a crasser song entirely, threatening to capsize some otherwise acceptable mall punk shit.
[5]