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Mar 25, 2022Machine Gun Kelly’s detractors will likely have you believe Mainstream Sellout is terrible. It isn’t, but nor is the fire burning as bright as it once was. There’s some fun to be had here, but ultimately, this is the weakest record of MGK’s rock era so far.
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Mar 25, 2022This awareness of his public perception seems to dominate the album, even in the tracks that don’t outright address it. As a result, the overall mood is far less authentic.
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Mar 25, 2022It’s all well-trodden stuff, and Kelly adds nothing new, but Mainstream Sellout is so much fun that – as the title suggests – it’s easy to leave your integrity behind and mosh along.
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Apr 4, 2022Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them.
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Apr 4, 2022Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them.
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Mar 28, 2022For the most part, Kelly uses rock to express his pain and rap to escape from it, i.e., abusing substances with Lil Wayne on two fairly pointless tracks. He has a nice rapport with Iann Dior on the pleasant pop-rock exercise “Fake Love Don’t Last.” But whether Kelly deploys “rock,” “rap,” or “pop,” selling out and annoying people online are the least of his issues.
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Mar 25, 2022Mainstream Sellout feels mostly like a middling attempt to further cross over into pop-punk, this time lighter on ideas and cohesion.
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Mar 25, 2022The riffs throughout this album are catchy enough to keep the beanie heads nodding along. But producer Travis Barker (Blink 182) repeatedly fills out the sound to the extent that the exposing angularity required to express true anxiety is lost.
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Mar 25, 2022Mainstream Sellout portrays MGK as a victim of success; it gleams like a fancy ornament on an industry merry-go-round – then the music hits you, not with a roar, but a very loud meh.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 44 out of 94
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Mixed: 13 out of 94
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Negative: 37 out of 94
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Mar 27, 2022
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Mar 26, 2022
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Mar 26, 2022Tickets To My Downfall is an upper, Mainstream Sellout is a downer, I absolutely loved every song on the album. Probably a tad more than TTMD