Jeff Rosenstock

Jeff Rosenstock makes increasingly chaotic albums for an increasingly chaotic world. With each

passing year, it feels like the temperature of the universe boils five degrees hotter, and with each

new album, Rosenstock’s music grows more unwieldy and lawless. Louder, faster, more feral.

Which brings us to 2023—a planet on fire, a mere 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday

clock, and the release of Rosenstock’s appropriately titled, anarchic record, HELLMODE.

“To me, the album feels like the chaos of being alive right now,” Rosenstock says

of HELLMODE. “We’re experiencing all these things at the same time that trigger our senses,

and emotions that make us feel terrible. We’re just feeling way too much all at once!” But for all

its textured turmoil, there are also surprising glimpses of clarity and grace to be found

in HELLMODE, when Rosenstock deliberately slows things down in places that are prettier and

more delicate, rare moments of shelter in the storm. Which only makes it more rewarding when

these moments unexpectedly unravel and spiral back into extreme, manic chaos, like abruptly

being flung into a Nintendo game on level 99.

HELLMODE marks the fifth studio album the prolific Rosenstock has released in the last ten

years under his own name, following the dissolution of his beloved cult projects Bomb the Music

Industry! and The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. Also tucked into his rapidly expanding catalog is a

live record, a ska reimagining of his 2020 album NO DREAM, and various dumps of stray songs

and loose singles. And somewhere on the side, he has found time to score the Emmy-nominated

animated series Craig of the Creek.

Rosenstock’s rising profile and critical acclaim over the last decade have been something of an

anomaly. He’s a proud torchbearer of the punk sonics, aesthetics, and ethos of his youth, leaning

into pop punk and ska sensibilities that were deemed Decidedly Uncool by the gatekeepers of

the time. (On any given day at a big outdoor music festival, he is likely the only musician who

will bust out a saxophone solo.) But when Rosenstock celebrates these styles, he somehow ends

up getting praise from tastemakers and landing on prominent year-end lists. Maybe it’s because

his appreciation doesn’t feel like cheap nostalgia or surface-level cosplay. Everything he does is

just so damned sincere.

That success is something Rosenstock has been conflicted about, and fuels some of the anxiety

that runs through HELLMODE. “It’s weird feeling success at the worst possible time, while the

world falls apart,” he says. “These things I’ve been unintentionally working towards for the last

two decades have come to fruition now, when everything is on fire.”

To record HELLMODE in the summer of 2022, Rosenstock once again enlisted his longtime

studio collaborator, Jack Shirley, the Grammy-nominated master of heaviness who has recorded

all of Rosenstock’s studio albums. But this time, they took a slightly more ambitious approach,

booking time at the legendary EastWest Studios in Hollywood. They recorded to tape in Studio

2, the same hallowed ground where System of a Down recorded Toxicity, and where Whitney

Houston laid down vocal tracks for The Bodyguard soundtrack. The newfound studio resources

produced the biggest and most expansive Jeff Rosenstock record to date.

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