Pop-punk crusaders Magnolia Park introduce a brand new world with their bold idea album, ‘VAMP.’
Stream: “SHADOW TALK” – Magnolia Park
Magnolia Park proceed to maintain followers on their toes with their unpredictability.
The Floridian band expertly blends sounds and genres at their whim, starting from entice beats to traditional nu-metal guitar. Their love for music drives them to create really distinctive sounds, and they’re continuously evolving, by no means staying in a single style for too lengthy, making it inconceivable to pin them down. Ranging from humble beginnings overlaying songs on TikTok, the band has risen to spectacular heights, firmly claiming their area within the pop-punk throne room.
Right this moment, they’re celebrated for his or her intensive musical expertise and larger-than-life performances. Having shared the stage with a lot of their heroes, the band is firmly positioning themselves as icons for the brand new era of pop-punk musicians, showcasing their versatility and innovation with each guitar riff and vocal efficiency.
Their extremely anticipated fourth studio album, VAMP (out April 11th by way of Epitaph), raises the stakes by delving into darker themes and that includes heavier instrumentation. The band expands its sonic panorama with highly effective guitar riffs and intense vocals beforehand absent from a lot of their songs. This shift in sound started in Australia, the place they determined to revisit the heavier components of their earlier work, Halloween Mixtape II, embracing a ferocity that excites each the band and their followers.
Along with their musical prowess, the band excels at world-building, infusing the album with lore-based characters and storylines that deeply resonate with listeners. The narrative of VAMP is richly immersive and seamlessly matches into the bigger lore of Nocturne Nexus, a fictional world “the place rulers and rebels battle with the long run hanging within the steadiness.”
Merging their deep ardour for anime and sci-fi, the band created characters like Aurora X1 and her Shadow Breakers, together with their struggle to combine the shadow realm with the bodily world. This album is not only in regards to the music; it’s an bold journey via the band’s artistic psyche, reflecting their progress and skill to captivate audiences.
Under, Atwood Journal dives into the world of VAMP and the influences that introduced Nocturne Nexus to life with Magnolia Park’s vocalist Joshua Roberts and guitarist Tristan Torres.
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Stream: ‘VAMP’ singles – Magnolia Park
A CONVERSATION WITH MAGNOLIA PARK
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Atwood Journal: What sort of private experiences did it’s a must to pull from if any to make that entire world of Nocturne Nexus come to life?
Tristan Torres: We simply actually love anime. From the beginning, I feel me, Josh, and Freddy, particularly, bonded over our love for cartoons and anime. So, I feel simply rising up watching anime.
Joshua Roberts: We wished to do this someday
Torres: Yeah, it’s like a private factor [to] inform our personal story via the music. My dad, he was an animator for Disney for a time and another stuff. So, seeing that actually impressed me as a child to do one thing like this for certain.
What I have been calling it’s the MPU, the Magnolia Park Universe. You’ve gotten all these different characters Baku and TV Head. How do these characters out of your earlier albums mesh with the world you’ve created for this one?
Roberts: So, mainly TV Head, Baku, Pumpkin Eater, like all these different characters they’re on this nearly nether realm of what it’s. So, proper now we’re on part two of this. In part two you get to see this entire different facet of the world that we’re creating the not-so-whimsical and not-so-fun facet.
Whereas on the opposite facet, in part one, it was extra just like the enjoyable characters and stuff like that. So issues are going to begin colliding a little bit bit right here and there and also you get to determine which character is absolutely what character from the previous and stuff like that. So, it’s a number of twists and turns which might be going to be taking place.
Torres: There are Easter eggs we planted in among the drawings, and I feel within the slums you’ll be able to see Baku’s bruise, after which in among the footage you’ll be able to see Houdini’s Emporium, magic store. So we’re colliding the worlds and giving them little Easter eggs for followers to seek out for certain.
What number of phases are there going to be, do you assume?
Torres: Actually we’re taking our time. That is actually for the followers as a result of we wished the followers to be linked to a world and really feel extra invested than simply music and band members and no matter.
It began off with Baku and the Halloween mixtape collection. We’re going to develop this world and see how far we will take that after which type of leap in between the Halloween mixtape and the Vamp collection.
I feel what’s cool about us is that we’re very artistic individuals and we’ll like possibly even provide you with a more recent story to line them up collectively. So, we simply wish to give greater than an album more often than not.
With that, I really feel like with all the things that you simply’re doing with the storylines, the lore and the music it may be type of laborious to steadiness that and be like we’re nonetheless a band. How do you just remember to preserve that steadiness?
Roberts: Nicely, music comes first earlier than something. We wish to make sure that the music is true. And we wish to make it possible for everybody’s pleased with the music. After which after that, after all of the music is boxed up into a pleasant little bow, we go, all proper, cool. How can we develop our imaginative and prescient from what we’ve been creating musically? How can we do this visually? And I feel we’ve been doing a reasonably good job with simply ensuring the music comes first and after that we type of construct from what the music is sitting at. So, that’s type of like how we’ve been doing it.
Together with your earlier work Vacant, It was far more of a pop-punk type of vibe and also you’re positively going manner more durable with the screaming on this album. Was that an intentional choice or did it simply type of circulation along with your concepts?
Torres: Yeah, like Josh was saying [music] is a very powerful factor. So, we wish to write music and we all the time have written music that we really feel very enthusiastic about. Even up to now, we’ve had songs like “Reaper,” which had a heavy tinge, or like “Tokyo,” which was very dancey [and more] pop and we’ve achieved EDM songs. So I don’t assume we’re genre-bound. I feel we simply love to do what we’re enthusiastic about after which we all know if we adore it, somebody out there’s going to love it.
Roberts: Yeah, and particularly with us we additionally preserve among the older tendencies in our newer music. Like our final tune [on the album], “Ophelia,” it’s a callback to Vacant. Which is humorous. So, we’re all the time doing one thing that’s harking back to what we’ve used to do however we’re additionally rising. So, we all the time wish to preserve that previous related however nonetheless transferring on from it on the similar time.
Aside from screaming and the pop-punk points to your music all through your entire discography there are hip-hop and rap components as properly. Was there ever a studying curve?
Torres: Yeah, it took us it took us some time. After Vacant, our first EP, we began making instrumentals that had hip hop tinging and that was actually not taking place but in pop-punk, possibly nothing, nowhere was what we had been referencing on the time, however we simply wished to do stuff we had been enthusiastic about.
All of us love hip-hop. All of us love the entire tradition of that and we wish to carry that to pop-punk and emo. So we simply had to determine find out how to make that [work]. It began with “Sick of It All” after which I feel “Exterior,” that tune had the primary hip-hop-like entice beats. We’re simply evolving, and we also have a Jersey Membership Beat in “Animal.” We simply do bizarre sh*t that we like that we expect oh this will probably be sick.
Roberts: This album popping out we’ve got extra like a European membership drop, in order that’s cool.
Torres: Now we have a number of craziness. We simply love music I feel. We’re simply music nerds so.
The final tune on the album is “Ophelia.” It type of ends on this sort of gut-wrenching level the place they ask the query again and again, “The place will we go after we die?” What was your intention with that lyric and what would you like the followers to have left behind with that?
Torres: After we had been writing [the song], Vince was in Germany whereas we had been within the studio. He despatched me a demo that included “Pumpkin Eater,” an previous tune of ours from the Vacant EP as a result of he actually loves that tune we had been going to Nashville as properly so me, Josh, Katie, and Andy had this idea. I’ve handled a number of like dropping mates to suicide and stuff like that. And on the similar time, we had been writing my grandmother was in hospice. So it was simply a number of dying on my thoughts.
So, me and Josh constructed off that idea and we simply wished it to be extra like a name while you’re very unhappy and also you miss somebody. You want they had been there. You’re type of reaching out, I feel. Like, inform me the place you’re as an alternative of answering the query you simply on the lookout for them. You recognize?
I feel that this album does play so much with the thought of life and dying even with vampires type of being the main focus a little bit bit. So I really feel like that makes excellent sense. Do you are feeling prefer it was a catharsis type of getting that out onto the paper and coping with these concepts as they had been taking place?
Torres: Yeah, we’re simply going via creating one thing which it’s not such as you create it in a day. You simply must determine it out after which the items come collectively. So, the entire vampire factor like I stated earlier got here from wanting us to do one thing the place followers really feel part of one thing and that was crucial to us like stepping into.
Earlier than we began the album, we did a Vampires meetup. We had been simply making just like the Vampires a group of a secure place for our followers and similar to to allow them to really feel a part of it.
Roberts: Not solely our followers however like a secure place for the group. We do a number of group outreach and stuff like that as properly. So we wish to make it possible for we had a gaggle that folks also can really feel secure but additionally like to assist others as properly and never really feel alone in powerful occasions. Particularly in 2025, there’s a number of powerful occasions taking place proper now. So, you wished one thing that folks can actually maintain on to for a very good motive as an alternative of a unfavourable motive that may be taking place.
Torres: Yeah, Vamp and the Vampires concept type of collided into that, after which it simply type of clicked into like making this entire album theme, however we actually write the music first, after which we locked in like in the direction of the tip, just like the music and the story like colliding completely. It was similar to a number of puzzle items making an attempt to suit collectively for certain. Particularly doing the brand new style.
Roberts: It’s a giant leap. It’s a giant leap on many different ranges, not simply musically however simply total feeling, vibe, all the things.
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“Shallow” – Magnolia Park
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