Review Summary: Breaking past the bottom of the barrel. We've hit a new low.
Let’s get one thing perfectly straight: it is borderline impossible to discuss
Popular Monster, the latest release from infamous core act Falling in Reverse, without discussing their controversial lead singer Ronnie Radke, basically the mastermind behind this entire album. If you are at all familiar with Radke, you probably already know enough about why he is so infamous. For those unaware, the Cliffs Notes is that, setting aside his multiple arrests, he has grown notorious for having a massive ego, as well as getting significant hate for being transphobic, and making his whole personality being insulting, condescending, and all-around insufferable to anyone who gives him even the slightest bit of criticism.
Um… if it wasn’t clear, I’m not a big fan of Mr. Ronald Radke. And this new album is not giving me any reasons to be a fan.
Popular Monster, which began its rollout in 2019 with the single of the same name, is one man’s ego trip set to rock music that is sometimes decent, but more often than not barely scratches the levels of mediocre. The lyrics are insufferable, the album is a stylistic mess that can’t commit to a single sound, and the vocal performance oftentimes feels like a bad parody of far better artists.
First off, let’s talk about Ronnie a bit more. It’s pretty clear that most of this album is his brainchild. It’s an album about him. About his views, his mental state, and about his views on the world, which, naturally, means that the lyrics get ugly and cringy really quick. At best, it’s the annoying whinging of a man claiming he’s being “cancelled” while putting out arguably the most viewed singles of his life. At worst, it’s a contradictory self-image, as Ronnie claims in one breath that he’s trying to get better, while claiming only a few songs later that he’s “about to go Darth, about to go Disney” on all of the people hating on him, all while he nails himself to a cross (literally, he’s nailed to a cross in one of his music videos).
Yeah, as if the subject matter wasn’t weird and distasteful, the lyrics just suck as well. Ronnie consistently pretends he has something deep to say, but ends up saying nothing repeatedly, usually retreading lyrical themes to an annoying degree (“voices in my head”, “all you people can’t stop talking about me”, “they’re trying to cancel you”, etc.).
Vocally, the album falters. Ronnie undoubtedly has a better voice than he did on past albums, and his singing has improved in certain areas. But Ronnie also decided he would be a rapper on this album. And boy, oh boy, this is where things get ugly again. Whether he’s trying to ape NF in “Prequel”, or busting out lyrical miracle rap in “Watch the World Burn”, Ronnie’s attempts at rap are obnoxious and corny and just not fun to listen to in any capacity. Hell, even his singing performance falters heavily in songs like “All My Life”, where he tries to adopt a country twang to his voice that sounds so forced, it hurts.
Speaking of “All My Life”, we can’t forget that Falling in Reverse is a
band, despite Ronnie’s attempts to put all of the attention on him and him alone. Stylistically, this album does not know what it wants to be. “All My Life” is an inexplicable country punk song, “Popular Monster” and “Watch the World Burn” spend more time on rapping over boring electronic/choral beats than they spend actually rocking out, and the actual full-on metalcore songs like “Ronald”, “Zombified” and “No Fear” oftentimes just sound like every modern metalcore song you’ve ever heard, which means the only thing that truly sets them apart from the pack is Ronnie’s vocals, which leads us back into the past few paragraphs of ranting I’ve done so far. Even the breakdowns sound forced. “Watch the World Burn” suddenly transitions into metal that builds into a breakdown with no prior warning, and the breakdowns in songs like “Ronald” just feel like a band going through the motions.
It sucks because there are slightly bright moments throughout the album. The title track is actually halfway decent, with a pretty good breakdown, and lyrics that are slightly less annoying than the rest of the album, which means you can actually enjoy it to a degree. “Watch the World Burn” does have some fun guitar noodling right before the super forced breakdown, and “Zombified”’s main riff is, again, fun at the very least. But it’s all buried beneath such a miasma of awfulness from Ronnie that it becomes damn near impossible to enjoy it for what it is. Hell, “Popular Monster” is somehow worse in the album’s context, because you can so clearly tell that Ronnie wanted to recapture that song’s popularity, without managing to recapture what made that song good.
And this is all without mentioning the features like Tech N9ne and Alex Terrible, which is a whole other paragraph of ranting that would just be restating what I had already said earlier. Suffice to say, they add nothing, and, in the case of Alex Terrible, actually make the album look worse for having them on.
So, where does this leave us?
Popular Monster is an embarrassment of an album that tries to paint its lead singer as this poor crucified soul, and fails miserably at it, while not knowing what sound it wants to pursue, and acting like it’s the hottest *** since sliced bread. When I wrote my review of While She Sleep’s
Self Hell, I erroneously stated that “It can’t get worse than this” in the review summary. I don’t know whether or not I should be happy that I was proven wrong. I cannot see there being a worse album than this released in 2024.
