If you’re like us and you’ve had Baku’s Revenge on repeat for months now, we have a treat for you. Magnolia Park recently sat down to take idobi through each track of their new album. Tristan, Vince, and Freddie talk about the songwriting, the inspirations behind the music, and what it’s like to turn fights into fired-up anthems. Check out the video above (or read the transcript below) and get ready to hit play on Baku’s Revenge for the thousandth time (you know you wanna).
—
Transcript:
—
“?”
—
Tristan: “We had Jay [Webster] from UnityTX be Baku’s DJ. He was just, like, yelling, ‘Turn it up!’ We just wanted to make a statement about how we’re the next generation upcoming, and we’re tired of taking all the crap from everyone hating on us because we do TikTok and things like that.”
Vince: “Yeah, it’s really funny because some of the reviewers thought it was Josh and were like, ‘Josh sounds very abrasive.’ And we were like, it’s not Josh. No, it’s literally Jay.”
Tristan: “Yes, shout out to Jay, thank you so much.”
Vince: “Yeah. And then we just added a bunch of stuff and I think we did the intro, like on tour in the van. And just like, sent it off a couple of days before everything was getting wrapped up. It was super last minute, but it was a lot of fun.”
—
“FEEL SOMETHING (FEAT. DEREK SANDERS)”
—
Tristan: “We recorded this with Matt Malpass. It was our first trip to L.A. ever, like, we were all so excited, super nervous. We got in the studio and we’re just writing, writing, writing, knocking out songs. And then we decided to take a lunch break. We all don’t carry food, but Freddie comes with PB&Js packed and ready, so he just stayed in the studio while we left. Basically, the whole song was done when we came back.”
Vince: “Yeah, I was hanging out there and [Freddie] had just like, written a voice memo to do the instrumental, and I heard it and I’m like, yeah, this is going to be freakin awesome, for sure.”
Freddie: “It was a good time.”
Vince: “Yeah. And we ended up writing the rest of the song together at the studio, with everyone contributing lines, like the pre-chorus, the verse, verse 2, and all that. And then, fortunately, we got Derek Sanders on the song too — shout out to Derek Sanders. That was awesome.”
Tristan: “Yeah, it came together pretty well. Shout out, Matt.”
—
“MISFITS (FEAT. TAYLOR ACORN)”
—
Vince: ““Misfits” is a song I started in like, March, April, and I knew a lot of people like our song “Liar” — what if we just did that again.”
Tristan: “Copy “Liar”.”
Vince: “I just thought it should be like a song about being toxic and being in a shitty toxic relationship. And that was super fun. And then I sent it to Tristan and Freddie, and Tristan added some of his ideas and changed some of the arrangement. And then we took to the studio.”
Tristan: “And that’s when we did the breakdown — oh, crazy breakdown. [We asked producer] Andrew Wade — we’re like, ‘Can you make us a breakdown?’ And you know what he did? He made that. Heaviest breakdown in pop-punk history. Thank you.”
—
“RADIO REJECT”
—
Tristan: “Now, we recorded this song…like most of Baku’s Revenge [it] was done in Airbnb sessions. We all decided — like me, Vince, and Fred — decided to just hunker down like two weeks prior to recording because Vince flies out from Germany and just, like, knock it out. So I think we’re on our fourth song of the day. We started at like 11 and we ended super late at night and we were like done. I had a massive headache. Freddie was losing his mind.”
Vince: “There’s this crazy picture where Tristan is on a bed, just like, ‘Ohhhh!’ Freddie’s in a corner. And I’m like, geeked off of Celsius.”
Tristan: “All the caffeine. I remember yelling, ‘Radio reject! Radio reject!’ And then Fred and Vince pieced it together — that song sounded so fire. Yeah, we were really happy [with] the way it came out.”
Vince: “Yeah, it was a random instrumental I had lying around with the riff and the basic instrumental going on. And then Freddie and Tristan wrote the hook, and then we kind of just like pieced together the rest of the lyrics, and yeah, it came together super fast. I think in the studio we ended up pitching that song up like four semi-tones or something. So it’s always a thing with some songs that they end up sounding better in different ranges. But yeah, that was crazy because that was like the last song that we did before the studio. We had no idea that it would become the lead single.”
—
“!!”
—
Tristan: “So basically the way we wrote this track is we took the ending of “Radio Reject” and we had a Ronald Reagan sample of him speaking on drugs. And we just wanted to have something very impactful leading into the next track that had to do [with] the topic. Like how Reagan basically started the war on drugs and impacted a lot of communities and families, and we wanted to make sure that translated playing into the next track.”
—
“DRUGS”
—
Tristan: “We lost a lot of heroes of ours in our generation, specifically Juice WRLD and Lil Peep. And it really felt like our generation was dying early, like superstars of ours that didn’t really have a chance. They’re dying at like 22 or 19. So we wanted to write a song that basically talked about losing life because of drugs and because of the system, or the whole big Pharma introducing a lot of drugs into society and pushing it when you go to the doctor, or just like how we have to deal with trauma every day as our generation and face that and deal with that. So we wanted to make sure that translated in the lyrics for sure.”
Freddie: “Yeah, “Drugs” is just a song about dealing with addictions and losing people.”
—
“PARALYZED”
—
Vince: “So “Paralyzed” was another Airbnb sessions song. That was when we were doing like three songs a day, it was the early morning and we just wanted something kind of fast and upbeat. So I just put together some chords and some drums, and Freddie and Tristan started putting some ideas together, and I think Freddie came up with the hook talking about trauma.”
Tristan: “A lot of the lyrics were written about like personal experiences, like [the line, ‘I learned the hard way / That my parents don’t know shit / Should they be raising these kids? / Gave me bruises on my wrist,’] is talking about growing up essentially — throughout the generations, you’re taught that hitting your kids is okay and that goes throughout society for so long, it becomes like a social norm. And for that specific lyric, that’s a hope that it stops, you know, because like, there are better ways to teach kids lessons.”
Vince: “I also think this generation is dealing with a lot of things, or at least is bringing a lot of things to light more than other previous generations. And we’re breaking the cycle on a lot of things. I think we just wanted to shine a light on that topic in the song as well.”
—
“ADDISON RAE”
—
Tristan: “We wrote this about a girl we all love.”
Vince: “Yeah, all three of us together, we’re all, like, madly in love with this girl — Freddie, Tristan, me – we all love her. But only one of us can be her boyfriend. So we had to have a battle to the death. And it started when Freddie actually got really mad at me.”
Tristan: “Freddie, tell the story.”
Freddie: “I peed in his fish tank.”
Vince: “Yeah. Like, what the fuck, dude? You can’t just do that.”
Tristan: “Yeah, so, pee in the fish tank, I got blond hair like Addison Rae. You can see the correlation.”
Vince: “Because his piss has bleach and yeah, that’s why I turned blond.”
Tristan: “And that’s “Addison Rae”.”
—
“GHOST 2 U (FEAT. FRED & JOSHUA ROBERTS)”
—
Freddie: ““Ghost 2 U” is a song that came from a concept that we all came up with that we couldn’t finish, but I thought the story was cool. The story is about a guy who dies and then he tries to get back to real life to be with his love. But she found someone else and he’s a ghost. So I just thought that felt like real life.”
Tristan: “I tried so hard to get back to you.”
Vince: “He’s a ghost to her.”
Freddie: “Doesn’t love him anymore.”
Vince: “Just like you!”
—
“$$$”
—
Tristan: “We took the vocals in “Ghost 2 U”, we put that thing… And we were on tour by the way. This album wasn’t easy to make. This is why I’m flexing with my $3 right now. It was hard work.”
Vince: “This is our merch cut.”
Tristan: “Yeah, right there. So keep that in mind. Anyways, we took some vocals of “Ghost 2 U” and then we just had Jay go crazy, I don’t know if you guys are into Chief Keef or anything like that. We just had him yell and hype up for the next track.”
—
“I SHOULD’VE LISTENED TO MY FRIENDS”
—
Tristan: “We did a session in L.A. with the legendary Nick Long and Andy Seltzer. It was amazing. I was super nervous because they wrote all my favorite songs. I was like, shaking. I was like, ‘Hey…hey, Nick.’ And yeah, we basically thought we’d come in and like, show our demos and work on them, but that definitely didn’t happen.”
Vince: “Yeah, we played “Radio Reject” and a couple of other songs and he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a pretty good hook.’ But he just plays us this demo, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I have this demo I came up with last night on the toilet.’ He plays it and it’s like him on the guitar.”
Tristan: “Oh my God, yeah, we were running around the studio. I think I jumped through the window.”
Vince: “I was crying.”
Tristan: “Yeah, there was a lot going on. Freddie was just chilling. But yeah, we basically just wrote about like a toxic relationship and dealing with that and how your friends are always there for you, like how we are for each other, guys.”
Vince: “I should have listened to my friends.”
–
Tristan: “Thank you so much for watching. It means the world to us that you support us and listen to our music. We wouldn’t be doing this without you. It’s literally the only reason — I hate these dudes so much.”
Vince: “Yeah, Fuck this.”
Tristan: “We love you. And this has been Magnolia Park’s Baku’s Revenge track-by-track breakdown. Let’s go!”
