Sure, there are suggestions of deeper traumas-late fathers, broken homes, forbidden love-but most of the album is cartoonishly rendered via graveyard walks and vague references to mental illness.

mainstream sellout never bothers to show you how twisted and broken Machine Gun Kelly is when it could just tell you: “I’m damaged,” he whines on “5150.” “make up sex,” featuring blackbear, is somehow more hollow than their collaboration on Tickets to My Downfall, mixing crass sexual references with such lyrics as, “I love chaos/I love toxic/I love wreckage/I love falling.” MGK leans into the worst tendencies of his Victory Records influences, blaming his rampant narcissism and misogyny on his exes and his vices. MGK and Barker aren’t exactly known for subtlety, but their latest collaboration is painfully prosaic to the point of meaninglessness. These songs feel cut-and-pasted together from a grab bag of adolescent clichés and recycled three-chord solos the eyeliner and lip ring seem even more like a costume when Baker opens the record with an impassioned “Why is it so hard to live?” Barker joins MGK again on mainstream sellout, but this time, their pairing feels less inspired and more paranoid. Situated among his fellow Barker-ians, most of whom were in short pants when Blink first broke up in 2005, it’s understandable why the 31-year-old might feel a sense of ownership over the Zoomer-led Hot Topic revival.

He tapped Travis Barker to produce Downfall before the Blink-182 drummer became a professional studded-belt whisperer, adding a jagged edge to music from disaffected Hype House e-boys.

Machine Gun Kelly, born Colson Baker, is wading into a far more crowded pool than the one he left in 2020.

Mgk me against the world album