lost americana starts with mgk nodding to the keys from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” and doesn’t let up from there. The lyrics of Guns N’ Roses, George Thorogood, Semisonic, the Black Crowes, and many more are invoked, sometimes obliquely but mostly just by name. “Semi-Charmed Life” is semi-covered, and the melodies from Goo Goo Dolls and Kate Bush songs are repurposed. He does to the Strokes’ “Last Nite” what it did to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” and he calls it “Sweet Coraline” because that is a title that allows him to make not one but two other references. Its lead single, “cliché,” is spiritually a zillennial take on the conceit of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” but sonically, it is a stab at grafting a hyperpop sheen onto John Cougar Mellencamp.

This is no doubt a deeply cursed record, a Hold Steady album that instead of referencing Youth of Today aspires to educate today’s youth about the existence of Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone.” But while lost americana isn’t good, per se, there’s something about mgk’s dedication to the bit, his quality-agnostic enthusiasm for the idea of popular rock music as a form, and the brutal honesty he embeds within its nonsense that makes it genuinely fascinating to listen to, and at times even successful when you take it on its own terms. It’s mgk trying to take on the great modern rock songbook while also going into painstaking and sometimes excruciating detail about how he fucked up his life last year. Who else would even think to make that swing?

mgk, real name Colson Baker, made this album after what can be lightly described as a rough patch. In November 2024, he and his partner, Megan Fox, announced they were expecting their first child together and then broke up two weeks later, allegedly due to Baker’s infidelity. Shortly after that, he relapsed after more than a year of sobriety and wound up in rehab, only to emerge to discover that the Los Angeles wildfires had destroyed his preferred studio.

So, as Baker tells it, he hunkered down with his touring band in his living room and self-produced a record that both aims for the big-tent pop-rock canon and near-Maoist levels of self-criticism. He announced the album with a trailer narrated by Bob Dylan of all people, which, despite his well-documented love of doing extremely random shit, was so out of left field that one would be forgiven for initially believing it was AI. It turned out to be very real, and came as a result of Dylan posting an old video of mgk freestyling on his Instagram, which seemed to mystify even Baker himself before he gathered the good sense to reach out to link and build with the Bard himself.

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.

“tell me whats up” is one of the few tracks on the record that feels sui generis and, as a result, leaves room for Baker to be unflinchingly personal, rapping plainly about being robbed as a kid, conspiracy theories, his musical ADHD, and the isolation of addiction. It’s a theme that continues on “treading water,” in which Baker accepts responsibility for his breakup with Fox and sings about how his addiction has affected his family (“While I pack up suitcases, I just ruined their holiday”) before rapping the next verse from his perspective while he was in rehab, “fixated on the gossip that I know is happening while I’m just being left out of the conversation,” wishing he could tell the public “for me, y’all can feel pure hatred, but just keep our baby out the situation.” That this is all happening amid a musical backdrop that sounds distractingly like the “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls is, frankly, bizarre, but it approaches something akin to a music world insider’s take on outsider art. Let’s just say it doesn’t not work, and if nothing else, it’s worth crediting Baker for spilling his guts when he knows it’s more grist for the content mill he’s writing in opposition to.

mgk is certainly trying hard on lost americana, but effort only gets you so far. It’s kind of silly to ding an artist for having “bad taste” at a time when a group like Frost Children is openly reclaiming festival EDM, but unlike mgk, they have a coherent vision of what they’re trying to accomplish. Without a razor-sharp point of view, mgk far too often fails to synthesize his very real pain into something truly artful, instead falling back on the crude tools of rote songwriting and borrowed melodies, which he occasionally manages to build out into something arresting thanks to his instinct for what resonates with his audience.

With lost americana, he’s not competing for a New Yorker write-up as much as he is to be the go-to artist for kids looking for a contemporary musician with a harder edge than, like, Benson Boone. That everyone now has access to unlimited music from every style and era, and kids on TikTok are just as likely to obsess over a rediscovered Outer Limits song as they are to perform the marketing-approved choreo for whichever new pop singer’s new single, does not contradict or diminish mgk’s wager, but instead presents a crucial opportunity: Through his curation of influence, he’s able to make an argument about what quintessentially American rock music is at a time when information overload has eroded our ability to place things in any coherent order. And if his self-crafted lineage happens to include some British songs, well, jacking for beats is as American as it gets.