lost americana

The artist formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly announced his seventh album with a trailer narrated by…wait, is that really Bob Dylan?! “<i>lost americana</i> is a personal excavation of the American dream, a journey to find what’s been lost,” drawled the 84-year-old legend over clips of mgk smoking, riding motorcycles and strolling the Vegas strip. “This album is a love letter to those who seek to rediscover: the dreamers, the drifters, the defiant. It’s a sonic map of forgotten places, a tribute to the spirit of reinvention and a quest to reclaim the authentic essence of American freedom.” Some wondered whether it was AI, but no, Bob’s just a fan. (He inexplicably posted a no-context clip of a 2016 mgk performance to his Instagram stories earlier this year.) The 35-year-old is no stranger to the spirit of reinvention, having deftly transitioned over the course of his career from a gritty Cleveland rapper hustling mixtapes at the mall to the poster boy for the pop-punk revival. Where 2020’s <i>Tickets to My Downfall</i> and 2022’s <i>Mainstream Sellout</i> funnelled his long-simmering angst into blink-182-esque riffs, on <i>lost americana</i>, he gets all James Dean: driving 135 MPH down a two-lane desert highway, chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, heading nowhere fast. “Take me somewhere cheap/Where the livin’ is easy/Out of all their reach/Set my spirit free,” he sings on the Springsteen-esque “outlaw overture”, and on “cliché”, he coaxes a lover to ditch this two-bit town and get married in Vegas. He channels The Strokes on “sweet coraline” and interpolates Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” on “starman”, but returns to his hip-hop roots on songs like “indigo” and “treading water”, opening up on the latter about the long road to redemption after a troubled year.