Let’s set the scene. You’re in your early twenties. You just screamed into your steering wheel. You haven’t really slept in two days, and your best friend just sent you a song that somehow gets it; that weird, vibrating ache of being alive in the year of our lord whatever-this-is. That band? It might be MTVKID.
This self-titled debut is not just an album. Rather, it’s a collection of nervous breakdowns wrapped in distortion pedals, duct tape, and unprocessed trauma. Which, of course, is a compliment. MTVKID doesn’t play coy. It doesn’t ask for your attention; it kicks down your door like a sugar-high punk gremlin and demands that you feel something.
Right off the bat, MTVKID comes at you with that unmistakable blend of punk immediacy, alt-rock angst, and just enough pop-rock sheen to remind you that, yes, this could’ve easily soundtracked a pivotal scene in a 2007 teen drama where someone runs out of a high school gym in the rain. The influences are obvious, sure: there’s some early Paramore, a little Jimmy Eat World, flashes of Joyce Manor, even dashes of The 1975’s debut in terms of the hooks if they stopped vaping long enough to feel feelings honestly. But it doesn’t feel derivative. It feels like a love letter to growing up with cracked CD cases and too many opinions.
More importantly, it feels like a band that has lived with these songs. There’s wear and tear on every track. That’s because this album wasn’t whipped up overnight in a content farm; it took three years. Three years of watching your dreams wobble, of texting your ex various things you regret, of staying up until 3 a.m. wondering if you’ve made a horrible mistake and then writing lyrics about it. You can hear that time in every tempo shift, every scream, every weirdly sincere lyric that catches you off guard between guitar stabs.
Tracks like “Dying Fast” run like an anthem for when your life is speeding toward something and you’re not sure if it’s a goal or a crash. It rips, it snarls, it fully sends, “Bro” might be the most disarmingly real moment of the album, with its energy of a bro-down at a dive bar where someone accidentally brings up real emotions and no one knows what to do. “Sunbride” shifts the tone with a kind of aching sincerity that doesn’t feel performative. It’s warm. It hurts a little. It hits like nostalgia you didn’t expect to feel.“Move On” is a banger, but it’s a sad banger of sorts, and it’s the best kind. Each track pulls from a different part of your psyche: the punk kid who never grew out of flannel, the emotionally-repressed guy pretending he’s fine, the overthinker who cries to voice notes. MTVKID has something for all of them.
Not to mention, this record isn’t just catchy. It balances youthful, punchy fun with an undercurrent of real, lived-in struggle. There’s a kind of emotional awareness underneath all the fuzz and chorus pedals that suggests MTVKID is not just yelling for the sake of it; they know what they’re yelling about. And in a time when mental health is more buzzword than battle scar, it’s refreshing to hear a band who writes about struggle without sounding like they’re selling you a self-help app.
It’s ironic, it’s sad, it’s cathartic, and sometimes it’s funny in a way that feels almost dangerous, because laughter is a defense mechanism, and these kids are fluent in that dialect.
As far as debuts go, MTVKID is the kind of statement you make with a cracked skateboard in one hand and a bleeding heart in the other. It’s not trying to be perfect. It’s trying to be honest, and that’s way harder. It captures the feeling of being in your twenties in a world that’s constantly melting down; too old to be naive, too young to be resigned, and way too online to process anything in peace.
There’s a lot of talk about “authenticity” in music, but most of it is PR fluff. This? This sounds like the real thing. A band writing music not to be playlisted, but to survive. MTVKID isn’t just another pop-punk-adjacent debut. It’s a sonic diary; chaotic, joyful, anxious, overwhelmed, hopeful, and more than anything, alive. It reminds you that music doesn’t have to be perfect to be powerful. It just has to be true.
MTVKID is a messy, beautiful scream into the void. Play it loud. Then text your friends. They probably need to hear it too.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
