2004 Called, And Even He Doesn’t Want Machine Gun Kelly & WILLOW’s “Emo Girl” To Come Back
We’ve included other Travis Barker collaborators Machine Gun Kelly and WILLOW in our list of 10 pop punk revival songs you need to know, so of course we were interested to hear that they’ve teamed up on a new song together, and that song just came out. It’s a very mid-2000s sounding song called “Emo Girl,” and it comes right after When We Were Young Fest and Emo’s Not Dead Cruise, sparking mid-2000s emo nostalgia.
Part of liking Machine Gun Kelly’s new pop punk phase has always been knowing it’s a little cheesy, but its not-so-guilty pleasures are often too hard to deny, even with silly lyrics, boring antics and so many other factors working against it. “Emo Girl”, however, is very easy to deny. The influence of blink-182 on this era of MGK was evident from the start, but this one really sounds like blink-182, and it has even less depth than blink’s most purposefully stupid songs. The “I fell in love with an emo girl” hook sounds like something Bowling For Soup might have come up with in 2004 and thought “no, that’s a little too silly.” WILLOW’s verse sounds great, I just wish she had saved the energy for a better song. Maybe next time, MGK.
“Emo Girl” will be included on MGK’s new album, which is now called General public sale (not born with horns, as originally announced). It’s out March 25 via Bad Boy/Interscope.
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