Before this current album, mgk lodged a major hit alongside Jelly Roll with “Lonely Road,” essentially a rewrite of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” whose success perhaps explains Baker’s approach on lost americana. So many big songs these days are just shameless rehashes of past hits that it’s barely worth making the point, but if your record is going to wear its influences on its sleeve tattoos, you might as well draw from a Pinterest board full of bulletproof melodies. The Pavlovian goodwill elicited by mgk borrowing the sound of “Running Up That Hill,” on “indigo” is so powerful that he nearly gets away with rapping, “Living fantasy like J.K. Rowling/I’m J.R.R. Tolkien these spliffs.” When he talk-sings, “I been up for day-ay-ay-ay-ays/Choppin’ up the yay-ay-ay-ay-ay” on the pre-chorus of the “Semi-Charmed Life” flip, confusingly named “starman,” it’s almost impossible not to be at least semi-char—uh, perversely amused—by his knuckleheaded ability to fall ass-backward into successfully putting his own stamp on a classic pop song about meth.
Sometimes, Baker tries to do too much at once without offering a sense of purpose. “dont wait run fast” sounds like a lost collab between Def Leppard and Motion City Soundtrack, and the only other thing you need to know about it is it’s the official song of ESPN’s College GameDay. “miss sunshine” is like Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Road Trippin’” run through a Sugar Ray preset, and attempts to evoke a vision of an idyllic, consequence-free youth that, charitably, could be read as mgk attempting to set up the record’s darker second half, but mostly feels vapid and out of place. Elsewhere, he has the inverse problem: “vampire diaries,” which is mercifully one of the few times Travis Barker pop-punks up on the album, is written from the perspective of a vampire. (There’s no metaphor there—he’s just imagining what it would be like to be a vampire.) As a musician, mgk doesn’t necessarily do one genre particularly well, but he does so many of them, each with equal enthusiasm. The gamut of styles on lost americana suggests that if mgk weren’t famous, he’d be the musical director/frontman of a particularly kickass and notably versatile cover band.
One of the remarkable things about lost americana is its consistent, knowing nods to cocaine use, which can be read as a nod to Baker’s very publicly no-good late-2024. “I miss my drugs, they’ve been my friends since 21,” he sings on “Outlaw Overture,” before the beat switches and he continues, “All of the pages are blank till my life goes to shit/I know I do that on purpose just to write again.” The record’s two best tracks, “goddamn” and “tell me whats up,” continue this confessional mode. The former sounds more like Lil Peep than it doesn’t, and mgk nails the assignment, speeding up his metronomic flow to match the urgency of the lines, “I’ve been drowning in something, I’m a downer on substances/I’m a functioning junkie turning my life around.” It’s a melding of lyric and delivery that suggests Baker might be turning a corner as a songwriter, able to embrace the idea that substance and form are complementary concepts.
